A CONTINUOUS TRAIL

My work is an exploration of a trail long unused by our modern culture, the trail to becoming indigenous to our place on this earth. I search for the way everything in this place, the Sonoran Desert, is tied together. We who live here, whether we realize it or not, are a desert people hurtling through a time and space that is unique to this place: its stones, streams, plants, trees, cactus and clouds, the wind, the smell of creosote after it rains, the intense heat of summer, all hitched together. The blood that flows through our veins is not that distant from the veins of water, the earth’s blood, that courses through desert canyons.

Indigenous people the world over have always understood this interconnection. with place, and their place within that web of life. We humans are not some superior species looking at nature from the outside. Our own bodies are composed of thousands of organisms; bacteria, microbes, viruses, a universe woven of threads that come from the more than human universe. As the botanists Dr. Suzanne Simard in Canada and Dr. Monica Gagliano in Australia have shown through scientific experiments, humans are not the only intelligent beings on this planet. Plants and trees, lichens and fungi communicate with one another, they protect, cherish and nurture their young, they even warn each other of danger. As a culture, we have forgotten how to talk to trees or sing to stones. My work has been a winding trail, but the continuity is clear. I have experimented with many ways of making my art: from darkroom b/w silver prints to wildly colored Cibachromes, from paint and patina on copper panels to wood sculptures that attempt to echo the shapes wind or water carves into the dried bones of desert trees. All of it has been in pursuit of what it might mean to live in harmony with this place, to understand the desert the way the saguaro or the mesquite does. I wish to remember what we used to know when we actually lived in what the film-maker Werner Herzog called the Cave of Forgotten Dreams. There is a photograph of a cave I took in the Grand Canyon, a cave we call Redwall Cavern. We have made it part of a National Park, a place off limits to humans except as brief visitors. This seems to be one of the only ways we know to preserve the landscapes we treasure, to make them off limits as places where humans can actually live. What if instead we could learn to consider all places sacred ground, honored the way we preserve the Grand Canyon or Tohono Chul Park? A Continuous Path implies the passage of time, a path long followed. Reverence for place, respect for our home land and all its inhabitants, is the work of generations. I have tried to follow the trail left by those who went before me, my hope is to leave some markers for those to come.