Flowerworks

are fictive faunas, an imaginative, predictive partway between flowers, fireworks and seafaring jellies. We camped once on the eastern escarpment of the Catskills for the 4th of July, hoping to see miles of fireworks as we looked east toward the Berkshires. Thinking we’d be enveloped in light and that sulfur smell I love so much, we were surprised to find that we were too high up and that the miles of fireworks were actually below us. In the dark, the fireworks looked like phosphorescent jelly fish floating up on a night ocean. As a kid, I snorkled one time in the hot August Atlantic. No one was in the water because it was filled with flat, clear jellyfish, and it felt sort of awful to bump into their non-stinging disks. I swam to the bottom and looked up through my mask to see the sun streaming through their bodies to hit my own. This work also conjures entoptic imagery, or what we see behind closed eyes, imagery that was especially important to the ancient artists creating pictograph and petroglyph rock imagery around the world. With our climate changing, it can feel like any fictive form can happen, can become non-fictive.

These works are encaustic monotypes with walnut ink, mostly on kozo or kitakata papers, sometimes with added oilstick. Occasionally I mount them on cradled panels. The scrolls hang singly or in groups.