Visual Fields links aspects of my previous work with the new, reprising and recombining materials and language I have been working with for years. I’ve arranged remnants from earlier works in different configurations, and have introduced new techniques and new elements. This exhibition draws together essential gestures from across my practice. In it, I approach making as a responsive act that involves engaging not only with materials, but with the sites and spaces where my work takes shape.
By tuning into the energies—the forces and flows—of sites of change, the works seen here join an ongoing conversation between the studio and the world. Often, my work begins outside the studio—places where I walk and witness the changing nature of our world and its matter—returning to the studio to see what arises when I allow observation to guide experimentation. I am always seeking to arrive, again, at something unforeseen, and to uncover unexpected ways of meeting the world through my work.
Visual Fields consists of several interrelated bodies of work:
Paths (Desire) is a suite of twelve photogravure and direct gravure etchings made in collaboration with master printers at Mullowney Printing in Northwest Portland. Each image reflects a moment arrested within the flow of time: a still pulled from an ongoing cycle of growth, movement, change, decay, renewal.
Language of Material is an installation of objects and ephemera, both natural and fabricated, from my working library—an evolving collection that includes material studies, tests, experiments, memos, and drafts, as well as sculpture, drawing, prints, and textiles.
The Premonitions are part of a series of unique prints that were also created in collaboration with Mullowney Printing, using cutaway shapes I saved from a previous body of work (the Unbound Volume sculptures, 2022). These shapes, assembled in loose and layered compositions, function as stencils, which are rearranged on a plate before each pass through the press. The resulting prints explore visual and physical texture, pressure and residue, opacity, translucency, and at times, the edge of visibility. Like the drawings from which these shapes originated (Surfacing, 2008–ongoing), the physical and perceptual dynamic between positive/negative space is inverted here. Figure and ground switch places, flip, swap roles. In the prints, what was a void or an absence becomes a primary compositional element: A shape emerges from a field, forms assemble in clusters—coinciding, overlapping, touching one another, falling together, then drifting apart. Improvisation is key: The steps in the process become a negotiation between limitations and opportunities, chance and choice. The process itself is rooted in experimentation, trading expertise for the joy of unexpected discovery; exploring texture, layering, blind spots, the unexpected, and play.
