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,