I sense the world as a primal, preverbal, synesthetic pattern. It sweeps me, awestruck, into its sensorial symphony. Feelings, thoughts, perceptions, impulses, and entities converge at their common denominator. Everything flows and swarms and synchronizes in a synthesized dynamism. I click into, participate with and as this pattern. 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. But to begin, my spirited “process of acquaintance” involves multi-sensory research and collaboration with the animate world as synthesized through visual means.
The conversation starts with on-site fieldwork. There, as a synesthetic, human sensor, I use mixed media to physicalize phenomenological relationships with light, time, and consciousness as they manifest in a given ecosystem. Through drawing, collage, painting, installation, photography, and digital media, the relationship develops on site, continues in the studio, and, if the situation allows, back on site. Perspectives from natural science, history, philosophy, psychology, and spiritual traditions converge to additionally feed the expanding conversations. As 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.
The collection of artwork from a given site accumulates to compose a team of meaning-seekers, eager to translate insights that can only be revealed through a continuity of intimate, reciprocal, ongoing participation. In such an idiosyncratic convergence of these [constructs of]place, time, and person, the boundaries grow porous. Each time this happens, my process of acquainting morphs into a reciprocity of consciousness: the insights my collaborator has gifted me arise and are activated within myself. The task then becomes to live this consciousness into the world.
And live them into the world I do. Teaching, collaborating, speaking, mentoring, parenting, friending, partnering, consulting; as a result of absorbing the rhythms of the world into my being, my practice propels itself into all dimensions. There is no realm in which insights gathered on the ground do not offer expert guidance; my gift and responsibility is to elegantly and dexterously receive, translate, transmit, and transport.
