When the Master Herbalist shares the syllabus and it says: “plant walk”, no one says anything. When we get to Level 2, on January 17th, 2023, it’s been six months and we show up after a bunch of things, a break after Level 1, the holidays, and some wild astrological energies and planetary movements are in front of us. I have begun to settle into the notion that I will be best served by surrendering. We were also told: you will be unrecognizable by the end of Level 2. It makes a human pause to consider that they know this to be true and you are about ready to head down this path. AND WHAT WILL “HAPPEN”? And what on earth does “unrecognizable” look like for me? It’s unnerving, and destabilizing when you have already been thrown so far down, the idea I would abandon the familiar seems potentially reckless. I begin to realize, I might have no choice. What we come to understand about a plant walk is…”if you have researched it, it is not your plant. You will know when your plant shows you who they are.” This is so stressful to me because I can easily imagine that my normal way of life, my plant would find me with great ease. By this, I would be riding my bike, and any number of plants present themselves. It is the dead of winter, even if it is climate change impacted and painfully mild, there are no plants blooming. How on earth is my plant going to find me? We are told it will happen in the next two weeks. A timeline you have no control over. The over-achieving, getting shit done, and there isn’t a thing I can actually do to make this happen. On a fairly stressful day consumed with my situation, I decided to check out and watch “The Lost Kitchen”. In the first two minutes (or less) of the opening of the show…with a pause between the other plants Erin names, she says…Calendula. I nearly lose my mind. HOLY SHIT. “IT” HAPPENED. And so it began. What unfolded is not for sharing publicly, although it is visible if you know me. To share that Calendula is linked with the sun. I am a Leo. I proudly offer: RULED BY THE SUN AND HEART when asked about my sign. I found this article if you want to learn more about the healing power of Calendula. This work embodies my essence as a child, my love for a graphic tee shirt, that I would later in life develop a graphic tee shirt business that generated in excess of $40.0M annually (it still exists today.)The ongoing reconciliation of my former career, the impact of that on the environment, and the continued linkage of my art as healing are undeniably present in these pieces. On the day I finished these pieces, I had done a meditation, and my solar plexus was activated in divine alignment with this journey, I am left in awe of this experience.
A side note too, we present a project for our plant walk. I knew immediately I would be making a body of new work. I found the silver metal on February 8th and I knew immediately I would be incorporating color into this work. During this walk, I saw my work in a new light and while plants, flowers, things occuring in nature have always been present in my work, the plant walk connected this for me in ways I hadn’t understood before. While we are our own medicine, and plants are medicine, it is a relationship that is co-created. I was willing to do the work, and Calendula as my guide walked me gently down my path.
Reconciliation: The Trees Will Wear Our Clothes
As a former business leader in the Apparel and Fashion world, I am in the process of coming to terms with my former career and my art practice that developed after a traumatic brain injury in 2014. As my brain healed, inexplicably I started to pick up detritus on my walks. Part of my “picking-up” feels like a rescue, and an offering of “care”. Often items are run-over, mangled and in that destruction, I am drawn to color, line, shape and wear.
This “collection” unintentionally developed in the lead up to the 2022 Fall Fashion Week and my upcoming residency at Wassaic Project. An article about a white tank top sent me over the edge. As I contemplated the materials I would take to my residency I was compelled to re-use thrifted t-shirts as the vessels to communicate the fear I have for the environment. I developed the conceptual work in 2D leaving the rest of the process for my time at Wassaic Project.
Upon my arrival, I saw a part of a tree in the wood shop “scrap” pile. I took the whole piece into my studio, laid down on and with it, in meditation. As I thought about the future of the planet and the impact of the apparel industry on it, I thought of the year 2050 and that we will not be able to make new clothing. I envisioned the earth filled with textile waste, and no people. In that moment, “The Trees Will Wear Our Clothes” popped into my brain. I knew then I would use the trees anthropomorphically letting the viewer look into the eyes of the tree wearing a t-shirt and reconcile their relationship with clothing consumption.
A side note in all of this, in September of 2022, Yvon Chouinard the founder of Patagonia, transferred his wealth and future profits of Patagonia to a trust that will dedicate all of its efforts to fight climate change. I had the absolute privilege to spend a day with Yvon at the Patagonia offices. I am forever grateful for, and inspired by, that time.
This work is my first formal site responsive body of work. In the first days of my Wassaic Project residency, I hopped on my bike, like any other day of my life. I kept to my routine of riding to a Farmers Market. On the Harlem Valley Rail Trail (HVRT) I rode past a large pile of tossed, partially burnt, very rusted metals, and some other straggling pieces. EUREKA!!! It was the only garbage I saw on the trail. I made between five and ten trips to haul materials back to the studio. One time a hiker thanked me as I put metal in my bag. My response: art materials. After about a week of trips, I paused as I felt abundant in my retrieval, but the lingering glass stared at me each time I rode by. I decided to pick-up the glass on September 14th, and come to peace with my haul, even though there was still a small pile remaining. I certainly fulfilled a fictitious, civil duty of a HVRT Clean-up. On my September 15th HVRT ride, I was shocked to a halt, realizing the pile was completely gone. Someone had actually cleaned up the remaining pile. I stopped to look for any evidence, anywhere. I finally found two small pieces of metal on the bike path, and a dead wooly bully. I brought them all back to my studio and incorporated them into my wall installation.
On a now fortuitous day in mid-March of twenty-twenty, a work table was delivered to my residence. I was minutes away from a work-from-home call/meeting and delivery truck showed up unannounced with a wood pallet, thinking he was going to a warehouse or industrial space, not a home. And so began the process of setting up a studio work space during the pandemic. Unforeseeably, I struggled as I adapted to having space for my materials and a place to develop work, while trying to understand how my work takes form. Simultaneously, my pieces shifted beyond found metals. This year became a year of acquiring tools, working in 3D, and exploring scale. These memorials developed as I began to incorporate wood, metals and other found objects with flowers.
October 2019
Over the course of the last five years, almost immediately after a traumatic brain injury, I began picking up rusted objects. Brain healing, no explanation for what I started to do during that time, that I now cannot stop. Location agnostic, sliding things into my bag, anywhere I walk. (I have a blown-out bottom of a garage can too, for perspective.) Shapes beckon my eyes, I don’t “look”, it’s like they scream at my eyeballs. A long path to now, for me, and the objects. Them discarded, me re-routed. The pieces lie in my studio, in-wait. I had no plan. As my practice, process and work evolved, I knew I wanted to make these sculptures, but didn’t have the skills. The night before my first Introduction to Welding class, the instructor suggested I bring some of my pieces to work on. Overwhelming idea since I hadn’t worked with these pieces and hadn’t thought about what work I would create. As I worked in the studio shop, we began solving the fabrication. Having never worked in 3D, my perspective shifted. Depth was now a consideration as was how to have them presented. After my time in the studio shop, I was walking to the subway, when I saw a piece of wood on the street, rusted nails. It was probably 9 feet long. I knew I wanted it as a base, but didn’t have a saw, because, who does when one is walking around Brooklyn, and honestly, I haven’t used a saw since I made my tree house on the farm, many years ago. I rode back to get it the following day, saw in my bag. I placed it on my bike, and walked it up to a random table thrown out in a somewhat desolate street. I set up shop. There too, I found more wood with rusted nails. I went back to the studio shop for the final session for fabrication, laden with wood and a different piece I thought to make. The Ephemeral Garden formed. Forever capturing flowers and their life cycles, these forming as flora, giving permanence to something otherwise dying, is only natural. These capture the inverse relationship of rusted detritus and floral lifecycles as an Ephemeral Garden.
February 15, 2018: The day before I was to leave to go to my last living grandparents funeral. The weather permitted, and I do what I always do, ride bike to the beach. This practice was something I “always did”, but not in this way. The original work started in August of 2017. I made one of these for someone in the same place. Ruined quickly as hurricane season rumbled through. There were many changes in that area from Fall 2017 to Spring 2018. I didn’t intend to start a Beach Art practice, however, on that Thursday in February, so much was gone. My grandmother, the place we sat on the day we met, the dunes, the rusted posts sectioning off the dunes, all the wood posts that ran parallel with the ocean, some doubled as benches. It was decimated in the relative sense. As I wandered, it happened. I found a piece of rust, and other objects. I started anew. With each subsequent visit, It remained in tact, and I became consumed with it. And so began the process, tending to the ephemeral. In complete and total contrast to my other work, which confines detritus, this work is fluid. People interact with it, at first with no respect, now with as much as I could wish. Weather forever manipulates the pieces. Sixteen months of bike rides, at least twice a month, and as often as three times a week, through all elements and temperatures, tending into the second summer of this work. The Beach Art is a reflection of the environment, our footprint on it, and a meditation on letting go.
July 2019
A July 4th ride, like most summer days, on my bike, the heat, conjuring future memories, a right-turn off the path, and a wander through Dead Horse Bay, never clear what will develop, never certain anything will, or won’t. Although, that’s the mind of someone who is gentle with themselves, giving the universe much room to work her magic. And so developed this body of work. Perpetually drawn to work that is site-specific, time often becomes the footnote. I gathered and gathered, only arranging once I got home. I staged this work outside to give time and space to it’s form. The Color Study formed quickly, the individual arrangements ebbed and flowed until the final assemblage takes place, forever a choreography.
Meadows and open spaces seeded with wild flowers and milkweed to increase bee and butterfly populations. My increasing concern with the massive decline in bee population, climate warming, our oceans as garbage receptacles, and accelerated extinction, riddled me with how I could make an impact. Taking on the voice of the bees and butterflies as activists, the underlying message is “persist and pollenate” in the natural environment. This in contrast to so much “resist” in the political landscape today. My propensity to work on long-term outdoor projects reflects the point of persistence instilled in me by my grandparents and father. Going back to my roots on the family farm, the garden my grandparents kept, I will monitor and document these areas for growth, bees and butterflies. This project started in May/June 2019.
Each piece denotes garbage collected from a single walk, on a specific date on the longitude/latitude (of the Manhattan Bridge). Collections mounted in plaster.
Often crossing these creatures, I honor their lives by creating a point of meditation on our collective existence. Migration and light pollution at the core of the downed birds in urban areas. The birds that succumb at the beach leave us to wonder if our environmental footprint played a part. Are they filled with plastic, a casualty of fishing? I make shrines for these creatures out of respect. Caring when perhaps no one else does, or for those that do, it offers a moment of silence while contemplating our interconnectedness and our impact on the earth.
