Statement
I am a forager.
Foraging is a way of remembering. Its weirdly cryogenic: keeping the burnished, autumnal leaves of sumac from the shore of Wagner Lake in Ontario, a pocketful of pebbles from the Blue Ridge mountains, still vibrant petals from a wedding bouquet, or the remnants of a favorite pair of Levis, for incorporation into a painting.
We leave a trace of ourselves behind every time we touch something. If that “something” is a tree that grows in Spain during the 1700s is cut down and lumbered to build a ship, and that ship sails to New Orleans, where it is scuttled, and the wood is used to build a home, which houses generations of families, and is subsequently annihilated in the flooding that occurred as a result of the levee breach following Hurricane Katrina…one has, in a single piece of wood, the memories of all those individuals…their lives, their deaths, their physical and emotional DNA, embedded.
Our arrival in New Orleans coincided with my own shift in wanting always to be present in my own life but never quite ‘living’ that.
Life in New Orleans can only be about the present: much of the past was destroyed, and the future is uncertain. The landscape of New Orleans constantly reminds its inhabitants that YOU ARE HERE.
Part witness and part voyeur, Mary and I had unusual access to the most devastated areas of New Orleans immediately following the storms of 2005. Captured here in photos, in mundane and intimate ways, are lives interrupted.
But this was about more than household possessions: this place told many stories. I began to collect what lay beneath the abandoned keepsakes, books and pictures. That is what I have incorporated into these paintings: an organic history of hundreds, indeed thousands, of individuals.
It’s akin to the psyche; the person we present today is composed of all the years and experiences that came before. Every touch we experience in our lives, no matter how incidental or fleeting, leaves a trace. We know that to be true when it comes to memories that we can actually recollect.
But what about the ones we can’t, perhaps yet, remember?
Embedded memory is about the continuum of life, and the resilience of the human spirit.
Embedded Memory
As soon as possible, after the flooding, we went to New Orleans.
I had been incorporating 'foraged' materials into my paintings for years, mostly organic.
Living in the country had taught me to look down, rather than up, and the first time in New Orleans was the epitome of that perspective.
There, on the ground, sunk into the drying mud was life: interrupted.
The idea of picking through peoples belongings, everything out there on peoples lawns, their books, their music, their clothes, their lives - was appalling. Because of the climate, and the water, however, these items were disintegrating, degrading very quickly, working their way back into the earth. My works contain the spirit, the physicality of the people who were there, who lived through this disaster.
The theory of embedded memory- that the items in the paintings have a memory, the memories of the objects that are embedded in them. Everything the items have touched, the memory is there, contained in that. Embedded memory shows the process of life, and my works contain embedded memory from New Orleans, from Katrina.
The texture of my works contain materials that were important to me. Wood, glass, paper, dirt, all of it collected and powdered, and mixed with the paint that makes up my work. My paintings need to be touched to be seen properly- you can ‘see’ with your fingers more that with your eyes.
I found my village home in New Orleans, I feel grounded and peaceful there. I wanted to create something here that was part of that. The whole process is about my change - about how some events are totally beyond your control, and perspective is so important. What is a flat tire, a cash register lineup to what happened after Katrina? New Orleans never stops, and even what happened to it was only an interruption, a breath held. 4:59 PM
a marriage of the spiritual and the material.
