This work began the year my father died. I was thinking about death a lot. I started with with sarcophagi for dead birds, supplied with a freezer full of dead birds that died flying into my windows or under the attack of my cats. I feed the birds, nurture the cats, look out the windows, and think about original sin. It was a time of life ending, and life starting, and ending again.

thrum is the remnant of that investigation, though its emphasis turned, with mine, toward something growing, burgeoning, rather than something put to rest.

As I worked in the studio and the season changed the work shifted unexpectedly toward flirtation: The first stages are opening and willingness: (un) furl, (un) fold. Then the first movements toward desire: murmur, ripple. I found myself thinking about flirtation (bird-style): the blush of new color and markings (flush and blush), the arousal that comes with desire (flutter, flutter/arch) the outright, bold challenge of availability (flamenco). Many of the pieces are based on wing forms, particularly as the wing rises, descends or dives. Some are based on motion relative to wind: billow, flap. All are moving in a field of desire for home, for food, for breeding or mad love. thrum, which began with the body of a dead bird, is banded with rivers and roots, home and food, emerging from seed.

fuse (hatch) takes its title from Dylan Thomas’s line “The force that through the green fuse/ drives the flower/drives my green age/ That blasts the roots of trees/Is my destroyer,” a poem about the desire, hunger and energy that link life and death. The fuse is the stem, the throat, the vein. The insects in fuse (hatch) are from a hatch of craneflies that rose and died in my studio. I will admit to having to hunt for a few more, original sin again.

This work is frankly feminine, I think, despite deriving more often from the behaviors of male birds. I hope I have embedded in it some ferocity and humor. One piece (un)furl derived its shape from a Canadian Geographic photo of a mallard defending its chicks from a heron. The image is heart-stopping, fierce, frightening, beautiful, full of the drive for progeny and the force of hunger, and the site where living and dying converge as part of the same moment.

porcelain sanded and overdrawn with insect swarms, maps of breeding grounds, images of roots, seeds. porcelain. graphite, pastels, underglaze, blush.. smallest- thrum-3″-largest hum- 32″.

Recapture is the name of a house in Utah, and the name of a creek that is located upriver from that house. Rivers themselves are a system of recapture, cycling water down, taking it back in.

Thinking of the word recapture, I of course also thought of Proust, and the many ways that we use this word: remembrance, longing, re-creation, battle. In the human cycle, loss is a constant, and the idea of recapture is predicated on loss but also on hope. We speak of something torn from us, something we almost remember, something familiar yet unnamable.

Most of this is recorded in one form or another on this piece: it begins with the December stars of the northern hemisphere arrayed around the zenith and moves into the structure of molecules, the meanders of Recapture Creek, and the San Juan River it empties into, lines from Paul Verlaine and Pink Floyd. These are laid one over another, interspersed with recapture in several languages, and are blurred into something we glimpse rather than see, the way we see stars, or remember.

The form terminates in a rubberized attachment. I think of it as looking like both a vacuum or a drain, like the rivers, and like memory.

porcelain. graphite, wire mesh, rubber. 36-40, variable”.

migration is based on the imagined avian body as witness and site of record. Marked by both events and by what must be remembered, these forms show patterns of migration, locations of sanctuaries, maps, markings, counting devices, celestial patterns. I came to this work through a season of reading astronomy and accounts of migration and travel above the arctic circle. I was struck by the intense beauty of celestial events that we might characterize as catastrophic, which led to the idea of a neutral witness recording terrestrial events.

The particularities of place drive the work. Far northern deltas and rivers, southern islands and coastlines, borders and settlement patterns are drawn from maps, but compressed so that destinations like the Yukon Delta and the Gulf Coast appear on the same form.

Parts of maps occasionally appear larger in the way intimacy and memory magnify detail. Because the maps and markings wrap the forms, landforms and rivers converge, delivering both accuracy and distortion. In the making of them I have travelled to remote places that have always compelled me, through the poetics of a recording system- maps- that is at once absolutely accurate and totally removed from the physical actuality.

porcelain. graphite, pastels, acrylic, insect pins. 11-17″.

drawings of beginning and end points of migratory routes, star maps.

An image of aftermath: a group of 24+ little birds forms piled in a loose crescent, an imagined outcome for small perching birds, that, crossing the Gulf of Mexico, deplete their reserves, and, faced with headwinds, starve before landfall.

porcelain. dimensions variable.

I have been working with real and imagined landscapes: maps drawn from atlases, drawn freehand, made up, islands transposed, destinations made large, coastlines straightened. How does wayfinding exist in the mind, how do we remember and locate home, what does the journey look like? How does a directed function like homing reveal itself through a map in the mind or drawn on instinct? We draw maps for others, with the important things large and detailed, and parts of the journey condensed or absent. In that kind of mapmaking we embed a system of priorities, and a hierarchy of values.

Maps are simultaneously the most real and empirical representation of place, and the furthest thing from its physical reality. They are the landscape of desire, longing, and imagination, a mix of speculation and knowledge. Star maps, wind maps, weather maps: maps lead us to what we cannot see or cannot see all at once; they are instruments of faith, a combination of observation, representation, mathematics, and memory. Often they’re wrong. Explorers have drawn lands that were mirages, that didn’t exist at all. porcelain. graphite, pastels, acrylic. 12-16″.

The genesis for this work was a chapter on observations bird biologists had made while studying birds in captivity. When a captive bird reaches the time for departing for migration, it turns toward the direction it would fly, if it could, and begins to whir, or flutter, even hurl, its wings against its cage. It will do this for the length of time the migratory journey would ultimately take.

I see restlessness in this constant murmur of wings. I imagine the mix of memory and desire that fuels that restlessness: that raw generative energy that persists and reasserts itself. In it is the desire for home, for food, for safe harbor for breeding. I imagine how it begins to manifest: slight motion, a flush of color, warmth under the skin. And then, home visualized, the journey and its hazards visualized, and finally the glorious rewards: great hatches filling the air, skimming along the water, clinging to rock.

These pieces each represent a beginning of movement; they turn slightly, stretch out. Feather tips turn rosy. The abundance of insect life is imagined and pictured on their surfaces. The image of a place seen from the air imprints like fragments of a map. Weather markings and large congregations of flocks are imprinted on their bodies.

As I made these pieces I thought about how humans show the very first beginnings of arousal with the slightest of indicators. Sometimes it is a deepening stillness. Often there is a slight tension in the muscle, a heightening of color, perhaps the smallest turning toward what is desired. Ultimately, here too, restlessness begins: the need to begin to move. The pieces are based on wing forms, particularly as the wing tenses to rise, descend or dive. Some are based on motion relative to wind. Some are based on muscle tesion in the aroused body. All are moving in a field of desire for food sex and home.

porcelain. graphite, pastels, acrylic, blush. 14-30″.

A series on navigation and weather. The pieces are lenticular in shape, and have weather markings on them as well as references to navigational systems.

porcelain. graphite, pastels. 20-24″.

Way-finding & the promise/memory of water. Natural funnels that concentrate as much as three million birds in a single sustained flight. Migration using the thermals created by flares from gas wells. 8000 storks counted around a single gas flare. What does this look like, travelling toward lights in the hot dark, blue and yellow smoky pinpoints in the dusty heat of day? “sahara crossing,” “sahel,” “sahara/sahel: wells,” “sahara/sahel: flares,” and “nightflight: graincoast” all imagine aspects of migration over inhospitable land..

porcelain, gunpowder 12-18″.

Cougar tails face off 360 birds, beaks open. Que es mas macho?

taxidermy forms, asphalt, clay, polymer clay. tails 3-4′, beaks 1″

Airships and boats pitching downward, listing geometries, landmasses on the move. Small boats in imploding space, holding tight, pitching in turbulence. I have often shown these pieces in fleets and formations.

clay, concrete, graphite. 14-20″

from a letter:

I am just about to start on a 10×24’ house made of cedar & rice paper, and cedar & lead, split down the middle. The split, the space between the halves, is a gap made by hastily-built, haphazard, barricaded walls, containing remnants of an inward-turned violence. One side contains materials for defense & surveillance, the other side medical supplies & archives for remembering & regeneration. The piece is more political than I usually get; I proposed it last year when all I could think about on any given day was what I had read about Rwanda that morning. Parts of bodies littering the shores of the lake. Clogged rivers. Home with no place to hide. My style isn’t especially narrative, but I think this house I am building and splitting may serve as a metaphor for that human/family unit that turns upon and divides itself. As it is reinstalled over the next few years it will mar & patinate, hopefully deepening the voice of the piece through its own history.

This piece was destroyed by the University of Oregon.

I work with materials as a physical poetry. The language of stones, dirt, metals, the language of skin, of dry leaves rubbing together, are languages we apprehend without translation. These are some of the voices: Hair: sensuous, embarrassing, human: erotic on the body, repellent separated from it . Clay: the dirt of our gardens, raw earth, the medium in which we bury our seeds, and our dead. Made into sculpture, eaten in hunger. Salt: the brine of tears, the means of preserving, what was left when Lot’s wife looked back. Salt cedar: the remnants of thicket, a confusion of lines, a harbor. And water: what connects it all, the juice, never staying still, converting to vapor, leaving husks behind.

I have tried to approach clay in its fired and unfired forms as a body of materials having specific dialects, specific properties with implications. Fired, it can be both hard and permeable; sanded and wet, it can feel like the tenderest and most private skin. Unfired it is our familiar. Mixed with dirt, fiber and hair, it is perhaps at its most powerful: unapologetically vulnerable, temporary, crude and raw. It is fragile, yet it coheres, binds, holds things together. It is tough & emotional.

Some of these pieces are small silky porcelain baglets, supple and smooth, filled with a saturated salt solution that slowly precipitates out, leaving a crystalline surface that encrusts and builds over time. The pieces contain and weep. The skin gradually becomes hidden by a crust that is fragile and renewable; the surface is a record of a history between liquid and air. The clay is the membrane: it holds, but it cannot hold completely.

These forms are on the edge of being identifiable, as the word we cannot quite remember or say is on the tip of the tongue, maddening, just out of reach. The birds say cocoon, say mouse, say scat; the swarm pattern says birds, says bats, says insects. The sacs say nest, bag, bulb. I imagine not being able to speak to be something like this: that without the precision of language the cocoon and the mouse live in the bird, and the exquisite sad sweetness of loss is a thicket we can no longer separate out.

My mother lost her hearing over many years, moving gradually into a world of silence. In 1998 she suffered a major stroke and lost language and the ability to speak. She lived comfortably in the first silence, but fought the second. The absence of sound and the absence of language are two varieties of silence with very different implications.

For months I made a meditation and a prayer of thirty birds a day, my studio open to the birds outside. Sometimes at twilight, working without seeing, I listened to Monserrat Caballe and the wings of hummingbirds. I thought of how my mother had loved those sounds, as I made these small birds, how tough she was then, how fragile. How to look back is to turn to salt.

This piece, an installation in two parts, is composed of sixteen hundred small birds made of clay and human hair, and sixteen suspended smooth porcelain forms full of saturated saline solution. On those forms a crust of salt develops as it precipitates onto the porcelain surface. The mouths of the birds are open. Under a thickening crust of salt the silk skin of the porcelain is disappearing. We recognize these forms but it is hard to name them. This piece is for my mother as she lived in two silences.

porcelain. salt water, piano wire, clay, hair. salt forms 18-20″.

from a letter:

I just installed dirt bags, five big hairy bags made from clay packed into wire, partly supported by thick dark rope looped over the ceiling trusses. They are somewhat comical, but also a little bit dark and lumbering, awkward and ungainly. They are installed on a stage next to a grand piano, and weigh in at about 200# each, so it was quite a project. The work is much rougher and closer to saying something real than I have been able to get for a long time. I think of the bags as diva (and back-up singers): bold, magnificent, yet slumping, baggy, drying, and cracking. It could be said that this is the work of a woman rapidly approaching 50. Embracing the hairy, compromising dark.

restlessness: insomnia is a map of 8 hours of sleeplessness on a summer night. The form is made of expanded metal foil that is coated and softened with acrylic polymer.

The piece is fundamentally restless; it is designed to move when touched. It incorporates ruptures, intrusions, turbulence and interventions that loosely approximate events in the liminal terrain between waking and sleeping. I see this blurred-with-sleeplessness-landscape as both irritating and magical, filled with the numbers of watching, with the sounds of animals, the tools of autoamusement, and the punctures of events.

The biological specimens at play in this piece were part of those summer nights of sleeplessness, when I slept in a barn, with the barncat. They were part of the maddening night, and part of the magic.

9′

This piece is a map of the movements of a barncat over 12 hours, as he moved toward dying. His path was purposeful, but restless. I watched, knowing that he was moving toward death. The dotted line is the path I took to carry him home when it got dark.

The map is fabricated from expanded aluminum mesh and painter’s tape. The mesh is raw, abraded and distressed, ripped apart, everywhere that he was not. These were the zones of my watching. The blue lines are his path, which were the vectors of deliberateness.

I am interested in how we draw these personal maps, whether the map to home or a place in the woods, or the map of a sequence of personal events. Cartography, earth science and mathematics are left behind, and parts of the map are expanded or diminished based on their importance. Sometimes we live in these landscapes, whose coordinates evolve from a different kind of empiricism.

13′

Plaza Blanca is a small region of white pinnacles in northern New Mexico. Georgia O’Keefe painted it, film companies have filmed in it, yet it remains relatively untouched and untravelled. At the entrance are a number of graves, crosses toppled. White sandstone spires rise above them. To get to the heart of this silent white place one must move sideways through deep channels of rock and climb up narrow vertical chutes. The interior is deep and narrow, pinnacles soaring on either side, the sky above a dark almost brutal blue. There is an illusion here of purity, unspoiled nature, and permanence. Plaza Blanca straddles human and geological time; it gives the illusion of unchanging stone, but the graves are leftovers from a television series, electrical cables run behind the pinnacles, and the rains widen the channel every year. What rises to the surface when we recollect place? How does it change as it becomes ephemeral? These remembered, reconstructed forms look solid, then translucent. The pieces shimmer when the light hits, then dull. Hanging in space, shifting with air currents, this is a mirage based on an actual landscape a thousand miles away, inverted by the lens of memory.

wire mesh, rice paper, acrylic, highway beads. forms 7-9′

Moving through deep, narrow arroyos: the huge, eroded landmasses below Zabriskie Point. The surface of the earth soft, bleached, and bright against the dark blue of the sky. A single insect. 115 degrees. largest piece: 8′ x 14′ x3″ Wood, drywall compound, highway beads

Pasadena Armory for the Arts, Josephine Ianco-Starrels, curator

This installation, based on the idea of moving landmasses as expressive of inexorable change and loss, consisted of several massive clay forms suggestive of hills or islands, and several more vertical forms reminiscent of desert or marine formations, with a wood and lead hull shape spanning thirteen feet cutting the space above them. The image for the installation came from a poem I had written to my brother.

clay, wood, lead. lead piece 7×13′. largest clay pieces 6×7′.

Every angel is terrible. Rilke

I started with the interface between mountain and sky. I thought about the edge of a blade. Images of wings began to emerge: Rilke’s angel, stealth bombers over the Mojave: breathtaking, carrying death, a complicated reference out of my own life, yet curiously in keeping with the desert, whose sky is regularly crossed by secret and deadly aircraft.

The pieces bear marks that refer to road or aerial maps; sometimes they are like divisions in the construction of a wing; occasionally they refer to the body. They are a response to what has become articulated in the form. Most pieces are made from porcelain and pigmented concrete polymer.

porcelain , pigmented concrete polymer. 14-30″ wide.

8-10 inches in length, porcelain, blistered lead chromate, graphite. Aftermath.

These pieces begin as finely sanded porcelain, filled with a saturated salt solution. They begin smooth, slightly moist, rosy & freshly bathed, but move through stages of light encrustation in patterns to heavily encrusted, enlarged, and swollen forms that barely retain the afterimage of the original form.

2 8’x8′ grids of thin, flat irregular porcelain hung over 2 8×8′ grids of ice, each cube 12x12x12″, dimensions varying over the course of 1 week. The regular ice became irregular over time, forming bridges and rivulets, and diminishing in size until the irregular porcelain grid became the dominant geometry.