Studio Investigations
How can art interrupt the illusion that humans are separate from the living intelligence of nature?
The work explores that question — and invites a remembering that we are nature.
emerging Bodies of Work
Ecological perception
Re-Enter Nature
I felt the impulse to return to a finished painting.
Then another. Then another.
Over time I realized I was re-entering these finished landscapes in order to locate myself inside them. That meant layering — paper, gold leaf, paint, mother of pearl— materials that each hold and reflect light differently. As they accumulated, texture developed, and light shifted. Patterns began to emerge. The paintings stopped feeling like images and started feeling like places I was moving through.
The logical next step is an installation.
Radical abundance
Seed Pod
Conceived as installation
Seed pods contain the architecture of abundance.
This investigation began with a vision of monumental seed pods suspended in space —seeds. Unnoticed because of their size, but exquisite in their architectural elegance.
Future environments imagine visitors moving among suspended forms, rotating structures, mural-scale paintings, and subtle soundscapes of desert wind — drawing attention to the overwhelming abundance present right where we habitually overlook.
The paintings are a way to explore that vision — materially and conceptually.
Creative instinct
Dress / Undress
I wanted to paint dresses.
That's where it started — a simple impulse, followed without overthinking. Paper, mother-of-pearl, gold leaf layered onto painted dress forms. The process felt less like painting and more like dressing — adorning an image the way you'd fasten a necklace onto a body.
The same instinct that guided childhood play. Still alive, just waiting to be followed again.
Future installations imagine life-scale environments where visitors dress and adorn the forms themselves — spaces that give that instinct somewhere to go.
From Surface to Space
Studio Investigations began as a way for me to understand and organize installation visions that I was having, seemly out of nowhere.
With time, as I followed material impulses and inner vision through to the form of paintings, the connecting thread began to emerge.
To see (or experience) the paintings fully, you have to move around them.
As you do, something shifts. Your eyes move in and out of focus. The image changes depending on where you stand. And at some point you realize that you — the one seeing — are part of what's happening.
The paintings are studies for how to bring that same perceptual experience of moving around a painting, to a scale where your whole body can enter it - moving through a landscape as art.
It is lived experience that shifts how we see ourselves. The actual felt sense of moving through something alive — and recognizing yourself as part of it.
Changing our relationship to nature means moving from observing it, to knowing we are also it. These investigations in the form of paintings must be accompanied by installation experiences in order to provide opportunity to experience just that. We are nature.
*More specific details on the vision for each installation can be found on the individual project page.
Studio Practice
I never see the finished piece at once.
A color. An image. Sometimes just a material that wants to be touched.
The work arrives one step at a time — never the whole picture at once. Each decision reveals only the next one. That's the process: following, trusting, discovering as it unfolds.
Installation visions arrived the same way. A complete spatial environment appearing before I knew how to build it. And as I started moving around the paintings, something became clear — what I was really after wasn't just a different kind of image. It was a different kind of experience. One that interrupts the feeling of separation from the living world. That reminds us, through direct encounter, that we are nature — not observers of it.
The paintings are early studies in that direction. Immersive environments are where I believe the experience of connection — of remembering — truly arrives.
collect & collaborate
For Collectors
If a specific work has caught your attention, you're welcome to inquire.
If you want to stay close to the work as it unfolds — new paintings, process, early access — the Collector's Circle is where that happens.
FOR CURATORS, INSTITUTIONS, AND COLLABORATING ARTISTS
These investigations are moving toward large-scale installation environments. If this vision resonates with you — as a curator, institution, or collaborating artist — inquiries are welcome.