A want – and an offer
Notes from a summer studio spot near Lander, Wyoming
I converted a short bus into a studio/home that I live in full-time within public lands in the western US. My work is now enmeshed with new material realities: the weather, road conditions, fuel consumption, connection with local communities. As a result, my studio practice feels held by both the small space of the bus and the expansive ecological patterns of the environment I am a part of.
I arrive in an area and spend time watching for a studio camp, a spot with certain qualities of solitude, protection from the elements, a sense of something geologically or ecologically to learn from. I try to spend an uninterrupted week there, determined by my water supply. I return periodically to the spot to be with it across a season. Depending on weather, a “studio” day could mean drawing inside the bus or walking and responding intuitively to features in the land with my body then writing or photographing them. Sometimes I set up a work table and spread out materials outside to make objects that are left to integrate in the land, photographed and destroyed, or carried with me until they resolve in relation to another place.
Proximity seeking: Silicone, ice frozen over night near Leg Lake, 2024
I make molds of gestures of holding, offering, cupping, and offering that explore the positive and negative forms of my body and how it contains or meets the space around it. A photograph of my hand holding versions of my hands extended in offering to catch the light, to melt against the granite, caught/collapsed in images.
Proximity Seeking: Pine resin and charcoal, 2024Pine resin, crushed charcoal from campfire
5” x 6” x 5”
Resin has long been used medicinally as a salve to seal and protect open wounds, heal skin issues, and to draw out splinters. The pitch is also burned to purify the air. I started collecting resin in when I was doing some difficult healing work on my own. It felt like the trees were showing me the way to make a kind of scab that heals and nourishes, a sweet and sticky poultice to address some of the phantom limbs of my own life.
I made a mold tightly holding the mold making material in my hands against my stomach and crotch as it set. Then I cast the mold inside a fire pit I found in public rangeland in the foothills of the Wind River Range. After casting the piece, I returned to the site several weeks later to find that others had built their fire on top of my body. This is the result.
