Statement
I am interested in the intertwining of aesthetic experience and ethics within cultures and communities. When I say cultures and communities, I include wild places, other species – the other-than-human. We do not live in this world alone, and community is an ongoing intimate interchange – a relationship we do not often consider, since we dwell within it.
Embedded in our westernized psyche and lifestyle is a core belief that nature is alien, outside of the human, and that nature is to be tamed and utilized. At the same time, a lived individual, personal and emotional relationship with the other-than-human is fundamental to our lives and well-being. The health and quality of this relationship is reflected in our values, beliefs and choices, and since personal relationships ultimately matter to us, this relationship with the other-than-human just may be the fulcrum of change.
Art comes into this because artists navigate the liminal spaces between self and other, bring back visions, translate and articulate messages, develop models of interchange. Art facilitates a process of learning through the engaged senses, at times bypassing conditioned patterns of thinking, allowing other ways of knowing to come forward, at times subtly, at times overwhelmingly.
My work explores how we humans navigate our relationship with the more than human world. It seeks territory beyond the borders of the accepted binary oppositions of mind/body, subject/object and nature/culture. It is profoundly concerned with lived meanings of dwelling and home. I’m curious about the intimacies of a shared biology, of the shared sensible – intimacies so obvious as to be unfamiliar. I question the taken-for-granted stance of human otherness.
