My artistic production examines the intersection of human/ecosystem relationships, and the erasure of our cultures’ memory, especially regarding systems in nature. The work is often haunting, sensual, and strategically beautiful, calling forth Universal artistic experiencing. The Self-Transcendence Series evolves from the Fertile Soil Series, embodying discourses of nature’s indigeneity, the climate crisis, and global and collective concerns.

Beyond the studio, my art practice encompasses contemplative communing with ecosystems. For over three decades, I collaborate with grasses, vines, seeds, branches, medicinal herbs, tumbleweed and rivers. These materials, these beings, each possess and convey their own voice. They provide for us psychological and physical sanctuary, and they ask of us to live consciously, and to see correlations between seemingly unrelated things.

The work contains the possibility to decenter our human existence. Too often, living nature is distant from us and becomes nearly hallucinatory like a fever dream. We are pushed into an acculturated envelopment with pre-occupations and micro-level obsessions. Removing ourselves from the center, transcending the self to embrace biologic-centered ecosystems as a
siblingesque practice, is difficult for all, at times even for my self. When we wander among the grasses seeing and feeling and communing with the biospheric logic of the planet, we open the self to relational existence of all, planetwide, and particularly in our immediate vicinity.

Using the example of Yucca in my work, multitudinous utilitarian accounts of historic uses over millennia are postponed in artwork’s content, to instead dwell on the energy emanating, in this case from the stem’s core, —so radiant, one loses sight of this flower stalk eclipsed by the brilliance of its own inner light. With the Self-Transcendence Series, instead of a narrative,
an existential experience in the presence of actual plant beings in the artworks strives to awaken something inside of us.

The infinite space of the artwork’s surface exceeds far beyond the four borders of the construct of the square’s physical boundary and is interrupted by the spine, creating a relationship between the surface drawing and the living yucca being; between the constructed reality and the presentation of life; the mimesis and the transcendent vitality that cannot be recorded,
—asserting a fundamental irrationality “to bring something incomprehensible into the world!” (Gilles Deleuze).

Each singular yucca stem indigenous to the land of the Southwest, and its preservation in the drawing, is honored through the high-level of detail in the rendering, and in turn honors the proximate yucca groups living in community in a shared underground rhizome system and with the sun, rain, and nourishing stones, soil, and neighboring fauna.

In the case of the smaller Studies for Self-Transcendence, the reduced scale of these artworks puts into visual form a subconscious decision, counter- balancing industrial-scale art, assertions of dominion, and mainstream social hierarchies to foreground concerns of socio-cultural weight such as ecosystem thinking. Drawing back from the prevalence of imposing jumbo- scale art, discreet scale works can be an act of resistance and commentary engaging an audience on a more personal level, on sensitive issues such as the othering of nature, thereby encouraging a closer, more reflective
interaction.

If my essence is the source of my practice, in this eco-existential moment, I work to reject isolating modes as an Illusion, with hyper-recognition that every entity is part of a larger network of inextricable relationships and feedback loops.