statement

I am captivated by sharp edges and contrasts in the natural world, and the “islands”—desert oases, vegetation zones on mountain sides and summits, tiny cinder cones, remnants of native habitat isolated in human-dominated landscapes, “actual” (oceanic) islands—that they define. These islands strike me as downsized, clarified, empoweringly “knowable” versions of natural spaces and phenomena (like continent-scale climate patterns, boundless wilderness, or massive volcanoes) that we typically think of as overwhelming or ill-defined.

Essentially these geographies give me a “world-at-my-fingertips” feeling that I heighten by compressing and structuring them even further in immersive, mosaic-like maps. The concept originated in the form of digital photomontages, later reinterpreted in oil paints, piecing together travel photographs to invent dramatic ecological juxtapositions. Ultimately these works evolved into my current watercolor paintings, now mainly accentuations of actual places. They knit together ground-level perspectives, still based on my own photography, with aerial views.

I think of these multifaceted compositions as maps because the experience of edges and islands is necessarily spatial. It requires zooming out and “up,” capturing geographical relationships in ways that most individual landscape snapshots cannot. The maps each provide an omniscient “view from above it all” at the same time as a “journey through it”—often along particular routes from facet to facet that show up as fragments of paths or roads.

(I have taken a few detours from this style and medium. My mixed media depictions of imaginary islands and volcanoes, purely aerial watercolor views overlaid with topography represented in plexiglass, are more like traditional, non-immersive maps. On the other hand, my combined musical and visual evocation of a fictional island ascent is more of an immersive journey—immersive in ways unique to sound—without the overall view from above.)

I refer to these maps more descriptively as worldviews: they describe complete yet contained and comprehensible “worlds.” The term also refers to my particular way of viewing nature as a series of bounded, contrasting experiences each given its meaning by others beyond. This mindset largely drives my real-world explorations, the creative work they inspire, and my written reflections on both.  

With many of these islands and contrasts in the real world uniquely and increasingly vulnerable to climate change and other threats, the maps have also become expressions of ecological fragility. My urge to accentuate that world-at-my-fingertips sensation—essentially a feeling of control—has expanded to include a protective impulse: we now literally hold the fate of these special (mini-)worlds in our hands. Even as the facet edges in the maps seem to sharpen and fix ecological boundaries, the overall faceting patterns (sometimes with a particular shattered quality) create an undercurrent of instability and disruption.

But the mosaic-like patterns could also be interpreted as evoking nature’s inherent state of flux and flow (human-caused and not)—a dynamism calling into question whether natural environments can ever be considered precious or preservable in the first place. Whether the faceting is read as conveying “natural” or “unnatural” environmental change, the maps suggest a way of visualizing and possibly navigating the tension between the physical reality of ecological impermanence and an imagined “pristine nature,” the latter a cultural construction that is no less real or meaningful on its own terms.