More than three-quarters of Americans would describe where we live as urban or suburban according to the US Department of Housing. I live in the heart of a suburban metropolis – the Los Angeles Basin. I moved here from a slightly more rural area of Northern California decades ago. The change in environment forced a change in my relationship to nature, and that shift has fueled my work. Over the past 10 years, my work has coalesced around the idea of recognizing the significance, beauty and awe in the nature of the suburbs, with a close attention to soil, even if it is just the soil of a parking strip. 

Soil, is not just a metaphor for the earth, it is, the earth. The strata of soil hold time from topsoil to bedrock. As a gardener digging in the soil it is possible for me to travel back in time to when the climate seemed more stable and people were not as detached from the earth because they relied on her to produce food, hold water and stay stable underfoot. I can travel back to when my my Armenian in-laws immigrated to this property, to when this soil was part of Spanish and Mexican land grants and Rancheros, the ancestral home of the Tongva-Gabrielino. As I dig in my garden, I dig through and touch this history. The soil and ephemera depicted in my work is from this land.

Soil is made up of knowable, nameable forms: humus, rocks, plants, animals, microbes and fungi, alive or dead or somewhere in between. As forms complete their lifecycles or primary purpose and begin the process of becoming formless through geological or biological transformation, they become soil, they become dirt, they become earth. I am interested in the gray space between form and formlessness.

Through the investigation of the particulars of nature in my immediate surroundings, I seek to reveal universal answers to unformed questions about my observations. The answers are slippery and, ultimately not so important, but they help me understand the questions I want to ask. It is the cyclical nature of the digging-finding-observing,-recording-questioning-repetition that propels the work.

The resulting images are a type of record keeping, a way to log and organize and communicate the observed. I use relatively eco-friendly, compostable materials and focus on the flotsam of nature; the dirt, the weeds, the dead birds. I work at a scale that fills the viewers field of vision, reflects human scale or invites intimate contemplation. Drawing is itself an observational tool, a way to examine and understand the world. There is a radical intimacy to the simple, deep and literal witnessing required for careful observational drawing. I communicate, what I find without interpretation, similar to a portrait painter and her sitter. Like any good portrait, I hope these images allude to the magic that we cannot easily see, the conversation between the knowable past and the speculative future…the subject’s soul.