Calling Up the Stones

This current body of work ambitiously tells stories of belonging and struggle.

Each work serves as an archive and map for places I have explored, mostly  a long list of locations on mountains, buttes, rivers, beaches and deserts. Most of the materials used in these works are from California and Oregon, but all the works carry field collected treasures from places further away, from Chile to the West Bank of Palestine. In order to connect gegraphies and cultures, cut, shaped and polished stones inscribe distances, geography,   skin and memory. 

There is nothing more intimate and kind; nothing convinces you that the earth waits for us in deep time like a stone revealing its beauty. A piece of star and magma, of time and gem skin, that has waited millions of years to be seen.

Trees and plants will tell you they tendril roots, dance in intimacy, to feed from the underground, the life of stars that feeds our world.

 Just a rock. 

It's easy to understand.  In our dreams we trace narrows, feel ravines open within, as if our ribs rode ridges. 

Some know the names, others the feeling, some own the land, others can only love it.

2023 Chasqui/ Indian Runner,  Acrylic, with Obsidian, Chert and Copper 

Its not easy to describe the calling of obsidian or quartz, the knowing that copper bells

are ringing, waiting for us to listen.

Within obsidian mirrors, we run still across continents.

                       2024 Anemona Mediterranea, Acrylic with Jasper, Agate Obsidian Quartz, Serpentine

I am sending earth, sending ocean and tides. If a people walk into the ocean

if the desert fills with flowers, we walk still towards our hearts home

forever return to what is yours, it belongs to you.

              2023 Catarata Lluvia/ Cataract Rain Acrylic with Flint Quartz Crystal Chert and Jasper

Where the rain fills us, along the way to hidden pools, behind  cliffs and overhangs

 floods cataract, life waits in streams of light

I can be a map of time, 

also give directions, to the mine

take a detour no one goes

up a wash of ancestors, pinyon pine and geode eyes

                           2023 Manta Primavera/ Spring Cloak with Obsidian Quartz and Serpentine

After they were sent away and the Ekeko torn into pieces, many stories were lost. Those that were remembered were kept carefully allowed to grow chapters, rooms that only the traveller would recognize when he returned.

* God of the Aymara in Peru and Bolivia- A bringer of abundance..

2023 Manta Tormenta/ Storm Cloak,  Acrylic, Chert, Obsidian  Mahogany Obsidian, Serpentine, Quartz

I follow the storm. It's where we were born, into the rain into the wind, into the earth, into within.