2009

In my work this year, I meditated on my 2008 trip to Antarctica by referencing issues such as the effects of climate change on the polar landscape and the complicated environmental consequences of global travel.

Long flights and ocean voyages have always provided ideal thinking spaces for me. When I travel, the clutter and distraction of everyday life shrinks away and I have time to ruminate on ideas for new work. While on a journey, I collect elements of inspiration in a visual journal, a place where my writing and drawings become intertwined.  Eventually, the journal becomes a rich archive of concept sketches, internal debates and notes on new techniques to be explored back in the studio.

As a printmaker and book artist, text just seems to fit naturally into many of my visual ideas. It generates content in a work, but the overall message can still be allusive enough to allow the viewer to formulate his or her own meanings and implications. In the works titled “Happiness,” “Oil” and “Sorrow,” text becomes fused into the landscape, sometimes towering over it and other times sneaking up behind it. The text gives order to the space, plays with scale and proportion and whispers private thoughts into the viewer’s ear. In many ways, the text relates directly to the images and structures, but it also references unseen forces which are equally present.

Much of this work conveys the powerful and complex emotions I have regarding my journey to Antarctica, giving the viewer a personal context in which to consider the effects of climate change. In the last three months, I have begun to connect my daily activities to this remote part of the globe, as I have developed a better understanding that the internet and the economy are not the only means by which we are all connected.