My practice incorporates media made from soil, foraged plants, and animal remains as a means for forging connections to a place. During travels around Vancouver Island and abroad, I often found myself searching for ways to memorialize and document the places that have impacted me in a manner that transcends traditional methods of memory keeping. I began collecting and cataloguing samples of earth, later processing into paints and shaping it into vessels. This raised creative questions around ecology and geology, as well as about my connection to place as a settler of recent immigrant ancestry. Gathering these components is not only about the material itself but about building a more intimate understanding of the landscape and the forces that work upon it. It also provides a way to process the rage and grief that results from seeing wild places and crucial waterways laid to waste in the name of profit. My work is intended as a reminder of responsibility to the land, and that we are temporary visitors on a very old earth.
