Artist Statement
As an artist and writer, I take a research-driven approach that combines printmaking and literary texts. My collages incorporate imagery of pre-historical archeological sites and their post-classical texts; in particular, islands of human habitation in the Mediterranean Basin like Sardinia, Cyprus, and Malta, or sites on the peninsulas of the Baltic Sea, where the evidence of pre-history still maintains its hold on the modern landscape.
Traced aerial maps serve as building blocks for the work and I organize each series around the same archeological site. I think of collaged interventions as a process of reverse excavation and interpretation, where material history is fused into layers, creating a contemporary palimpsest. Completed pieces begin a new life as an object of inscription, erasure, and memory. I experience repeated encounters with an image as a form of ritual, and my redress of that image as indicative of the deepening that ritual offers. Over time, my work becomes an act of modern pilgrimage.
Each series utilizes a unique combination of site images and texts. My research includes in situ experiences of each archeological site and combines physical modeling and a deep-listening practice. Experience of a site is crucial to realizing a form. Upon return to the studio, the process is sensitized to what I have absorbed about a place–its material properties, purposes as defensive or burial, cardinal orientation to light, placement to water source, the social function of its spaces, and its record of growth and decay. I then choose a literary text that shares geographical origins to the site, and addresses themes of materiality, language, impermanence, and home.
Seen as a whole, this union of an ancient and pre-literate imaginary with contemporary poetics questions the immutability of monumental spaces and suggests new avenues of return.