The Paper Forest
Current work focuses on the Paper Forest evolving in my Grand Isle, Vt., studio.
The forest: rock, soil, leaf, cloud, lake, rain, air, mold, weather, filled with plant, animal, insect life, their nests and their bones, one thing the food for the other, everything manifesting and decomposing like mad. It provokes me. I want to see it all, the ruinous marks made by my species as well as the tiniest hints of renewal, the left-over light. I make my portrait of the forest with abaca paper, over-beaten and pressed into sheets using traditional papermaking techniques, formed over various structures and merged into collaborative life forms. The experience of creating objects to populate the installation - stand-ins for a disappearing natural world – with its substitute materials and problems of structure, with its inescapable futility and replacement purpose, draw both the artist and the work, unbidden, toward shock, surprise, joy and sadness.
News
Jan. 2010, the Paper Forest traveled to Nagoya, Japan, joining artists from Vermont and Japan for the exhibit called On The Planet.
June, 2010, it travels to the Holland Paper Biennial at CODA museum in Appledorn, and Museum Rijswijk.
A variation exhibits in September at Studio Place Arts in Barre Vt.
An alter(ed) ego turns up in a group show April 7th at FlynnDog in Burllngton.