I am an artist, writer and cultural anthropologist. 

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Attending to visionary forms and latent sensations congealed in landscape, my paintings explore the zone between inner experience and outer observation. Intuitive and research-based, site-specific encounters ground the psycho-spiritual forms and figures in my paintings.

 

Recent paintings draw on site-specific encounters in the American West. Haunted by manifest destinies’ possessions of land and space—the ‘on and on’ of consumption and expansion—I’m interested in the counter-possessions of inner-visions, ephemeral-signs and ecological imaginaries that disrupt this ‘on and on.’ The slow-time of painting allows me to find a stopping place in the middle of experience, where abstract forms and spectral images emerge from ‘settled’ landscapes.

 

Staged among the apocalyptic ruins of industry and fragile ecologies wrought by climate-crisis, these works re-imagine place through a language of speculative and spiritual vision. ​Often using 'red dirt' as dye and pigment brings the painting surface into contact with deeper layers of time and matter: an accidental geography appears, shaping and resisting the figural scenes in my work.

 

The problem of mediation continues to occupy my research interests: how invisible/immaterial affects and sensations are mediated, materialized, and made sensible to a body, and extended to the 'outside' world. My writing (on art and other subjects) is informed by my training as a cultural anthropologist. My dissertation, Spectral Bodies of Evidence: The Body as Medium in American Spiritualism, was based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork among North American Spiritualist mediums, and focused on the shaping (historical, media-tic, sensory) of bodily experience into an 'instrument' of spirit presence.

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