CREATIVE RESEARCH STATEMENT
I sense the world as a primal, preverbal, synesthetic rhythm. It sweeps me, awestruck, into its sensorial symphony. Feelings, thoughts, perceptions, impulses, and entities converge at their common, transient denominator. Everything flows and swarms and synchronizes in a synthesized dynamism. I click into, participate with and as this rhythm. My outputs and engagements are a record of my becoming and a manifestation of our metaphysical, multi-sensory existence; attempts to glean, bear witness to, and share this infinite beauty and insight.
Through a creative practice that permeates all aspects of my life, I cultivate relationships with ecosystems to absorb and participate in their wisdom. The insights I gain on the literal ground are then transferred into relationships with humans and societal systems, extending my visual practice into one of contemplation, conversation, and relational leadership.
Setting with a smoke-stained Oregon sun mentored me in the nondual holding of beauty and grief. Climbing out of a light-drenched gorge prepared me to support family through tragedy. Flattening with a floodplain forest trained me to slow down, shed “toxins,” and share “nutrients.”
The practice starts with on-site fieldwork, ideally in an ecosystem already activated by ecological concerns, educational activities, and/or interdisciplinary research. There, as a synesthetic, human sensor, creative inquiry physicalizes phenomenological and imaginal relationships. This becomes a spirited “process of acquaintance” involving multi-sensory research and collaboration with the animate world as synthesized through visual means.
“By animating the world, it returns to the soul.” James Hillman, imaginative recognition.
With drawing, collage, painting, installation, photography, and digital media, I develop connections on site that continue in the studio. Perspectives from the natural sciences, history, philosophy, psychology, and spiritual traditions converge to additionally feed these emerging conversations. I experience different vantage points, time scales, seasons, materials, textures, gestures, intelligences, and levels of consciousness. Dialogue expands, understanding deepens, and I gladly dematerialize into the familiar inevitability: I am participating in an ever-expanding, multi-dimensional, transitory whole.
In tiered, underwater drawings of endangered eelgrass, I invited a beach community to consider the link between “cause” and “affection.” To make visceral the sensation of a “tipping point” for a less-scientifically-minded public, I animated “tipping” multi-media collages. As a way of encouraging students to exchange black-and-white, linear thinking for liminality and cycles, I collaborated on an installation with a decomposing birch tree.
This idiosyncratic convergence of [these constructs of] place, time, and person causes boundaries to grow porous and dissolve; process of acquaintance morphs into reciprocity of consciousness. Through continuous and intimate mutual participation, the resulting artwork and I coalesce into a team of meaning-seekers, witness-bearers, and insight emissaries that serve as conduits for more-than-human understanding.
Eventually, the relational work opens further paths of inquiry that intertwine with the physical outputs. Via workshops, courses, collaborative research, trans-contextual projects and symposia, publications, and consulting, I live into it: translate and transmit.
By animating the soul, it returns AS the world.
Photo credit Joe Klementovich