This work is part of a larger series titled “never/ever”, which explores a world of psychologically-informed landscapes and waterscapes that express intersections of death, change and wonder.
Cracking open a geode, running fingers over a tumbled creek rock, and rummaging for fossils was a big chunk of my childhood. The ways in which rocks and minerals are embedded in each day and moment of our lives is far beyond what I can understand or visualize. We consume them as medicine, use them as currency, build with them, and grind them up and make any number of substances. They become buried in plastics and machines we think of as exclusively “human-made.” We abuse, revere, covet, and love them for the ways they connect us to the core of the earth and all its power.
The fractal formations of rocks and minerals directly inform the language I adapt for much of my drawing and painting practice. The base forms of cubes, triangles, and spheres become a wealth of seeds from which to grow a garden. Here in this never-ever place, I envision them as liquid archives—consumable and ever-growing histories of what the ground has digested and soaked up.
The mouth of the cave opens up into tunnels of the underland, that which has survived extractivism and where lakes and waters make unseen sculptures and drawings. Crystalline plants take their cues from both coral and geode and quietly contribute to the story that is to come.
Just a month after I made this work, I listened to N.K. Jemison’s Broken Earth trilogy, and found such immense power and synergy with the ways her characters enter into collaboration and conflict with mineral and geological forces. Born of pressure, heat, time, and both passive and extreme circumstances, it is no wonder that we fixate on crystals of all scales.
