(For Joanna Macy and my mother)
Flowers have participated in the making of this garden. Each painting is mutually composed and becomes a trace of our time together. Flowers, in their inability to move or evade the world, exist and flourish by opening more fully to it. They seduce creatures from other species rather than their own, modeling inter-special orgies, and reminding us that evolution is not only about being “fit,” but about taste and beauty. Emanuel Coccia feels we should look at every landscape as an installation designed by the aesthetic choices of bees. We are able to live because we breathe floral excrement. To live is to penetrate the world and be penetrated by it.
Thus I want my paintings to stretch out of painting-ness, me to stretch out of me-ness, flowers to stretch out of flower-ness, penetrating each other. In this, I remain loyal to materials of canvas and paint, softness and fragility. Steel is used for support, like a spine. Each flower forms itself with different weights/transparencies of gauze or canvas, with droop, pockets, glow, hinge, crochet, bead, seed, wrap or drip. My language responds to the flower’s language, an interspecial love affair, a folly and an expression of devotional grief.
Nectar is the transcendent drip that pours through our bodies, offering softness and surrender, and it is the flower’s love juice, seducing the world and making it hers. The flower “enters the earth …already to rise toward the sun.” She eats light above and below, descent and ascent as one breath. I am grateful to Karen for inviting this garden into her kingdom. Our work together is the mirroring circulation of this one breath, this simultaneous penetration of shadow and air, this rootedness and rising.
Special Thanks:
Misty Skrabal of Essen Creative for the botanical bar & desserts, Jennifer Crump of Starry Lighting for her essential electrical work, to Bill Haddad of Blue House Design for projector/technical support and to my beloved assistant Emma Hollingsworth for an energy in the studio of shared delight, her patient ingenuity in video editing/mapping, and the sensibility she brings to crochet ombres and what we call “flower snot,” embroidery and beadwork, ever fluid in her ability to meet both me and the flower where we are.
Projection Participants:
Elizabeth Pecore, Jen Crow, Ciceley Fullylove, Megan Olivia Ebel , Belynda Montgomery, Charm Carlin, Ella Adams, Melissa Sanderson, Carrie Fussell, Tippi Clark, Madelyn Wigle, Molly Wallace, Isabelle Bechtol, Savannah Layne, Lois Kim, Elizabeth Chapin, Emma Hollingsworth, Anna Marie Rosenlieb, Rachele Merliss, TaraRose Macuch, Cassie Courtney, Plus 3 anonymous participants.
