Through the media of painting, photography and installation, this body of work investigates my connection with the natural world. Having grown up in an intentional community in rural Tennessee, the motivation in trying to realize a self-sufficient agricultural society has engendered a proclivity toward nature and an interest in what it means to search for utopian perfection.

As an artist, my focus on a utopian notion of our place within nature touches on my past, but also seeks reconciliation with the present. My interdisciplinary approach allows me to create works that play between seeing oneself as an intrinsic part of the natural landscape, as well as an observer of it. The seeds, sticks and trees I am interested in as objects, but also in the space they occupy, as environments or fantasy landscapes. My very intimate and slow engagement with the forms and what I choose to cover or leave revealed is about both observation and discovery. The transformation that happens by covering and obscuring their surfaces with threads and flower patterns becomes focal to the search for what is ideal as well as the futility of that search. My meticulous act of stitching mimics the instinct to preserve, nurture and protect what is viable, what is becoming precious. The gold coverings make a metaphorical reference to beauty, desire, and preciousness with this added “false” skin.