Statement about Topamnesia/Landings
The confluence of landscape and memory has guided my work as an artist since moving from Northeast Scotland to the Midwest twelve years ago. My paintings and drawings depict landscape elements in the form of isles, mountains, and bodies of water that are derived in part from recollection and in part from documentation. By retracing and manipulating topographical maps and photographs, I create resonant geographies, both real and imagined. While remaining autobiographical, the reach of this project is to wider philosophical and emotive issues surrounding displacement.
A defining moment in my work was reading Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps, by Edward Casey. This book went on to inspire two groups of paintings I made between 2004 –2007: Inscape and Topamnesia. Inscape derives its title from Gerard Manley Hopkins description of inner landscapes of the mind. The second series borrows its title from Casey’s notion of ‘topamnesia’ as the “remembrance of place, especially that informs a painter’s rendition of a place or region she has once experienced in first person; in such memory, the place or topos constitutes the major themes or primary concern.” The work from both series explores some of his complex ideas of displacement, abstract painting and its relationship to maps; and re-emplacement, or a ‘reconnecting’ to the land.
Other investigations into memory and place within the landscape have encouraged the development of my work: Emmit Gowin’s aerial photography, Kathy Prendergast’s City Drawings, Lordy Rodriguez and Michael X. Ryan’s mapping-based drawings, are a few examples. I also view my work within a longer, far-reaching lineage including Northern Sung and Romantic painting. My research is further indebted to Yi-Fu Tuan’s, Space and Place. Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory, Ann Whiston Spirn’s, Language of Landscape, and WJT Mitchell’s, Landscape and Power, all continue to provide invaluable resources.
My practice remains meditative and introspective. But, the experience of living and working in an adopted homeland has informed my artwork with a larger cultural identity. I aspire to continue to make work that carries personal narrative into the public discourse.
Statement about Envelopes Paintings
The Envelope series began in 1999, after spending six months in limbo in North East Scotland, while awaiting the correct papers from the American Embassy to return to the States. During this period, I was working in an oil company mail-room, (Aberdeen, my hometown, is a drilling town on the North Sea), and this is where I began to collect the envelopes, attracted to the security patterns inside. I did not have a studio so engaged in other activities like taking long walks along the beach at the North Sea and photographing the landscape. I accumulated many photographs of theses scenes and like the envelopes, saved those.
At first, there was no clear reason to collect the envelopes other than an attraction to the material. Upon return to the States, however, the idea germinated to trim and cut the envelopes into shards or strips that could be employed like brushstrokes of paint onto the canvas surface. While reviewing the imagery in the landscape photographs, I was struck by the similarity between the emerging striations of the Envelope Innards paintings and the landscape photographs pinned on my studio wall. It then became clear to me that the series was a very personal reflection upon place, location, identity and memory.
After this new understanding about my work, I then proceeded to make many versions of this series, each exploring subtle nuances of shifting colour and pattern. Glimpses of text and pattern disrupt the organic rhythms, while the linear shape and hue of the cut-paper strips bridge the gap between a parallel use of drawn and painted elements. The undulating happened through the process of making: when the envelopes became wet with glue, they curved and it was then relatively simple to nudge these individual curves into accumulative wave –like forms.
In this work, a conscious attempt was made to make the imagery clear, clean, bright and linear. It refers not only to the North Eastern Scottish landscape where I grew up, but also to geological rock forms and activities like knitting or embroidery, both activities I was surrounded by growing up. Further, the work is spacious, ethereal and hopefully, uplifting, in whatever sense one chooses to translate that word.
By retracing and anthropomorphizing topographical features such as coastlines into fields or islands, I am attempting to create resonant geographies, both real and imagined. While remaining autobiographical, the reach of this project is to wider philosophical and emotive issues surrounding place and our sense of belonging.