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LIBRARY
WINTER
GARDEN
BOTANOMY
TRAVEL
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I
suspect these pieces chronicle the years my husband and I have been
trying to start a family- a humbling journey. The struggle to get
pregnant moved on to a surprisingly long wait for an adopted child. My
emotional ups and downs are in the palette. Hopes and wishes appear in
the light and in the drawings of plants reaching with out-of-season
blooms. Barrenness and fertility seem to be elemental themes. The tides
and swirling energetic forces join the atmosphere of the landscape and
its emotional sweep.
I use an old Polaroid camera from the 1970's and a film that gives me
both a negative and a positive. The film acts slowly in the winter cold
and tends to
develop only half way, solarizing (reversing) the lightest tones. These
landscapes come across as otherworldly, more like drawings of a place
where
twilight holds day and night in an odd balance; the seasons exist
simultaneously; water, sky and earth remind each other of their common
business. I am attracted to the inter-relatedness of it all, nature's
miracle of cooperation.
The photographs are mounted on wood and then sealed in translucent
encaustic medium (bees wax w/ a resin hardener). I use etching tools to
draw a response to the photograph, filling the etched lines with oil
color. Several encaustic layers build an interpreted place, season, and
time of day. This process obscures the work's photographic origins,
moving more toward the world of printmaking and drawing. I allow myself
to use a photographic image five times to see what happens each time
depending on my internal landscape. I think of these
"editions" as families, cousins, or siblings born with the
same
genes and destined to realize their own potential.
On January 2nd 2006, our son was born, we were notified the next day,
and picked him up a day later. In my new-parent daze of tiredness and
elation, I am in love, a kind of love I haven't felt before. This new
tide of emotions is bound to change my work in ways I could never work
anticipate.
 
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