My work ranges from drawing to installation, using plants and fungi to make pigments and sculptural materials. While I also harvest my own materials from debris in gardens I tend and collect from kitchen scraps, I primarily focus on the use of invasive species which I gather independently. These species negatively impact native biodiversity and my goal is to bring attention to the importance of California native species conservation. My work is meant to visually reflect the properties of the native environments that these invasive species are threatening, referencing familiar patterns and textures found in these locations. In using natural pigments and materials, the value we place on permanence is reversed as the ingredients in my work continue to assert their own presence and change in their appearance, color, and durability by nature of their biodegradability.
My practice operates on a continuum as I gather what emerges according to the seasons, and make work evocative of the physical patterns, textures, growth habits, and visual behaviors I encounter in the native landscape. My drawings don’t solely exist to exhibit the materials I use, but seek to beg the question: How much might we be overlooking when we think we understand the lifeforms outside of us? And how does the human desire for permanence impact the external and internal health of ourselves and of the native environments we live in?