Artist’s Statement
Mangled machinery twisted in the rubble of war is flanked by a stylized landscape that is a setting for a rescue. Flowers bloom and birds blithely roost, oblivious to human havoc. The title, Magic Mountain, also refers to Thomas Mann’s great novel that re-examines early 20th-century bourgeois society and explores the sources of the destructiveness that continue to emerge from “civilized” humanity.
Plumes from bombs rise from a seemingly empty landscape where their damage is hidden but no less real. They are framed by flora and fauna to recall a more idyllic, peacetime nature. Reveal juxtaposes the human impulse to destroy with our impulse to create. Weapons of war spread toxins and leave actual scars on the landscape, decimating species of all kinds. Our cultural expressions are representations of our aspirations but cannot alone repair nature or restore peace.
The Phantom Limbs series of drawings are dominated by floating braids tickling or teasing tree stumps with no roots. In Phantom Limbs: Mist, impossibly long plaits loop and contort, approaching but never connecting with a tree trunk of questionable stability and foundation. It is a suspended attraction, a union on the brink, a balancing act.
Phantom Limbs evolved during a 1997 teaching exchange in Amsterdam where I bicycled daily along the city’s canals and wondered at the amputated willows that lined them. They seemed almost victimized in their stunted stature and gnarled scarred branches. Later, I learned that regular and severe pruning was a necessity: if the trees become top-heavy, they uproot and topple from the damp soil. Atypically, in this instance, human intervention actually preserves nature.