2019 - 2023
Earth pigments, graphite, colored pencil, wax on Yupo
Please visit the Columbia Museum of Art website for an interview about the project.
In summers of 2019 and 2023, I teamed with aerial videographer Cary Brooks to capture low-altitude drone footage of the San Juan Basin badlands. While Brooks was above, I was below, drawing and gathering pigments to use in a series of drawings of the same landscape, for a project that allows a viewer multiple perspectives into the landscape, and the body’s space within it. All field footage was taken with BLM permission.
In creating these loosely-referential topographical drawings, I use pigments collected in situ, ground from striated layers of silt, sand, and clay. Using these soils as a self-referential drawing medium invites consideration of both the history and context of the materials embedded within the image as well as the terrain upon which one physically stands.
Gathering soils for pigments, San Juan Basin Badlands, 2019 (photograph Cary Brooks)
Ink, earth pigments, colored pencil, wax on Yupo, 2018.
Series I, details, and Series II
Photos: Forrest Clonts
In Charting the Badlands, I focus on the landforms of New Mexico’s San Juan Basin, an oil and gas-rich region characterized by banded geological formations and extensive resource extraction. With ongoing leasing of public lands, there is an urgency to experience the landscape in a state less-touched by excavation and exploratory infrastructure, while also mapping the impacts of development. The drawings reference the history and physicality of arroyos and canyons, pipelines and fences, and the less-visible divisions between public and private lands.
Columbia Museum of Art - a recorded artist talk on the series
CMA’s Instagram feed - a walkthrough of Island Nations/Lands Divided, featuring drawings from the series.
Ink, watercolor, graphite, wax, colored pencil on Yupo.
2011 - present
Ink, watercolor, graphite, wax, colored pencil on Yupo. 2011 - present
This project began while working with a French patrimoine group to rebuild a length of dry stone wall using traditional tools and methods. Dry stone construction exemplifies the direct relationship between the qualities of raw materials and the makers’ understanding of structural logic and practical need. In the process of rebuilding this stone wall, the concerns of construction translated directly into the studio activity of drawing. How do layers build dimensionally, in space and on the page? What does the wall require for maximum stability? What mark will fortify the entire image? When imagined through a biological lens, dry stone architecture bears more than a superficial resemblance to the form and function of epithelial cells, ubiquitous boundaries in plant and animal life.
Ink, watercolor, colored pencil, wax.
2013 - present
Ink, colored pencil, wax on Yupo, 2017-2018.
Photos: Forrest Clonts
2017 - 2018
Graphite on paper
Ink, graphite, watercolor, colored pencil.
2014 - 2018
In my practice, drawing is an intimate act of seeing and touching, leaving marks that echo and build upon a lived experience. Working in New Mexico, I create images that combine elements of the observed environment – the canyons, arroyos, skies, and stones – with an imagined biological language of mark. The drawings reflect both the colors and textures of place as well as my own sense of body and form.
Ink, watercolor, wax and colored pencil on Yupo, 2015 - present
2016-2018
Ink, watercolor, wax. Dimensions variable - 24x72 - 60x42”
Ink, colored pencil, wax on Yupo, 2018.
Photos: Forrest Clonts
Offerings - Documentary by Tucker Prescott
In April, 2018, I had the opportunity to travel with a group of artists to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located on a remote island between mainland Norway and the North Pole. Already home to the largest collection of seeds varieties in the world, the mountain also now houses artwork that makes explicit the connections between seeds and culture, art and science.
As part of this larger effort to nurture connections between biodiversity and creative culture, I developed (In)Nascence, a series of mixed media drawings that evoke the earliest stages of seed germination. Based on my observations of germinating bean seeds, the drawings are portraits of the embryonic, nascent, moment when conditions are optimal for growth and potential is activated. To learn more about the project, please visit the Svalbard Global Seed Vault site.
In 2019, the project continued in the form of the Seed Cultures Archive, an online collection of artworks I co-curated with Fern Wickson.
photo by tucker prescott
These graphite drawings are inspired by the biological dark matter uncovered through the process of genetic sequencing.
Graphite on Yupo
2012 - 2013
