My earliest memories nestle in and around a small wooden and tarpaper Geodesic dome my parents built in the woods of Southern Illinois. I remember climbing out of my crib before the sun came up to play in the leaves of the velvet damp forest floor, scaling monumental tree roots in the creeks, and falling asleep gazing at the branches that filtered  starlight through huge (leaky) hexagonal windows. That period in the early 1970s, when my parents and their friends were inspired by visionary architect, Buckminster Fuller, and the Back to the Land movement to create their own small commune, didn’t last long and my memories have the gauzy, golden feeling of a story worn thin from retelling.

I believe the reason the memories persist is because they were from an earlier world, where anything was possible if I just went Outside. Outside was not constrained by the limits of school, church, or family I would soon learn about. Outside was endlessly creative, a limitless multiverse in the woods, where learning was exciting, usually collaborative, and as easy or hard as telling a good story.

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As an interdisciplinary artist, I ‘conjugate worlds’ somewhere between the remembered and the imagined,  illuminating, stitch by stitch, frame by frame, glimpses of the colossal quilt our kinship and shared obligations to each other have woven over time. I strive to map the intersections between complex systems like overlapping posthuman kinship systems or settler colonialism and the natural environment. The work is often inspired by my lived experience as a parent of three neurodiverse children, two of them queer, and as a teacher in the same kinds of lower socioeconomic communities I, myself, grew up in. In my fieldwork practice, I collect evidence—videos, photographs, and sketches—from the posthuman borderlands. Through editing and layering this material, I examine the variations and similarities between how we, as individual animals--human and otherwise--experience the passing of time, memory, and the natural world. Mark making and poetry provide the armature of my installations and socially engaged practice allows me to invite communities into dialogue. 

My influences are more than I can list, but include Tacita Dean’s sublime analog films, Mark Dion’s inquiry into how the 'scientific' arrangement of objects communicates an often hidden power system, and Donna Haraway’s post humanist analysis of our shared ontology with other animals and our place in the natural environment. I look to William Kentridge for his animated narratives that grapple with almost unfathomable injustice, Anselm Kiefer’s monumental works of materiality in response to the ethical and affective impossibility of facing genocide, Jacob Lawrence’s blend of the intimate and the monumental in often autobiographical story paintings, and Sally Mann for how she illuminates the beauty and terror of motherhood and childhood, especially in a hot climate. Finally, I find inspiration in Kiki Smith’s feminist mythos and lyrical interdisciplinary work.