From the window of my studio on the Columbia River, I’ve been watching this one buoy along with the movement of water, vessels, sea lions and birds. These floating markers —small, bright points bobbing in the vast river, have become a presence in my work as I seek balance amid the currents of constant change.
Over the past five years, buoyancy has become more than a metaphor; it has become a way of moving through life. Not long after I lost my father in 2021, I entered a period of profound transition. I upended my 38-year life in Portland and made a bold and ambitious move to Astoria with someone I trusted as a friend and collaborator. Together, two independent, self-sufficient women, we imagined an unconventional new beginning rooted in chosen family friendship. We moved into a beautiful home while I established a studio perched over the Columbia River.
What followed was a succession of losses and upheavals. When that relationship abruptly unraveled under difficult circumstances, so did much of what I thought I was building. I found myself struggling to regain my footing amid the chaos. Then, within six months of one another, I lost both my mother and then my sister. Each time I began to feel that I was finding solid ground again, the ground seemed to shift beneath me.
But these last five years have also brought extraordinary joy. I found love in the eye of the storm, became engaged, and now I’m standing on the threshold of marriage and my 60th birthday. I have somehow been able to straddle all the grief and joy, upheaval and stability, to exist alongside one another. Finding Buoyancy grew from living within these opposing forces and from the question of how we remain open to life and keep going when the currents beneath us are in constant motion.
Finding Buoyancy explores the tension between weight and weightlessness, surface and depth, movement and stillness. Through encaustic painting and wax collagraph printmaking, I build layered surfaces that reflect shifting currents, geological formations, atmospheric patterns, and the passage of time.
My process itself has always been an alchemic act of discovery. Wax is so maleable; it can be carved, brushed, embedded, scraped, printed, and transformed. Layers accumulate and obscure to reveal traces of what came before. I am most interested in the interplay between control and chance, how a surface can hold both evidence of human gesture and the unpredictable forces of nature.
Throughout the work, runes, astronomical symbols, fixed stars, and symbols of buoyancy reveal moments of stillness and discovery. They are markers of strength, awakening, faith, transformation, and direction, steady reference points of orientation bobbing on an ever-shifting sea.
For me, finding buoyancy means being present and open to change while seeking balance and direction. These works are not maps toward a fixed destination, but records of grappling with uncertainty, carrying the weight of experience while staying open to the organic beauty of love, transformation, and beginning again.
