Artist Statement

I am a conceptual artist focused on environmental crisis. Environmental crisis terrifies and inspires me. I deal with this fear by making art. My art is where art, science, and community engagement intersect. My conceptual art is a way for me to engage with the viewer on a difficult, divisive, overwhelming subject.

In my earlier work, I collage science fact text on existing art - maps, horror movie posters, WWII propaganda posters - to give the viewer a different perspective on environmental crisis, so they can deal with it in a positive way for themselves and our earth.

In my most recent work, I collage classic paintings of paradise, purgatory, and hell onto classic National Geographic world maps, to form a triptych that engages with environmental crisis - the ideal (not always ideal for all people or nature), the purgatory of now (we are at a turning point - will we save ourselves or will we perish), and the hellish outcomes of not adequately addressing human induced environmental change.

Using words as art is relatively new. One of my inspirations is Jenny Holzer, who uses words as collages on familiar outdoor public spaces such as billboards and buildings that become her canvases, to raise social consciousness.

Using the actual environment as art is old - but has just recently been revived in the art world. Maya Lin is another inspiration, as she makes environmental art on a large scale, using the landscape itself as material and canvas.

My art uses words, like Jenny Holzer, and reduces the large, familiar, public landscapes of Holzer and Lin to a traditional canvas scale, and on already existing artforms. My canvases are WWII posters, horror movie posters, and state and global maps. You could say the artists I admire collage onto existing landscapes, just as I collage onto existing media to illuminate the environmental crisis uniquely.

Collage is a recent form of art. Words and classic images, photographs and tissue paper are my materials, just as the classical artist uses paint. I use tape rather than paste to adhere them to my canvases, to highlight art’s imperfection and impermanence, reflecting life itself. My work is “messy” and as an outsider artist I am not going for a perfect, polished look. My work is audaciously imperfect; reality is messy, impermanence is real. How do we deal with such a world? What is our place and purpose here?

My art illuminates how environmental crisis is irrevocably linked to how we view the natural world and ourselves. When you view my art, I hope you are inspired to question your view of the world, to recognize how we depend on the earth and how it depends on us – and to realize that our beliefs and actions create the world we want to see.