Exploring visuals for the translocation/colonization of fauna.

Here's an excerpt from my essay:
I make work about our relationship with ecology. This summer, my scholarship led me back to the monarch butterfly as I read about road ecology and the impact it has on various species. The monarch’s migration to forests in Mexico follows the freeway where it can find random patches of milkweed. Why do they follow the road (a route of danger) instead of the fields and meadows of the Midwest? An easy answer is that milkweed, the plant where monarchs exclusively lay their eggs, grows there. The reality is that it is has become the only place milkweed grows on the migration path. We have genetically modified plants to be resistant to weed killer, so farmers are spraying farmland with chemicals to kill weeds including milkweed. So, the monarch faces human-made challenges including collisions with vehicles, habitat loss due to avocado and corn production, fire, and development the entire length of the migration. Ben Goldfarb astutely notes, “A combination of Roundup and ethanol production wiped out 30 million acres of milkweed between 1996 and 2013, an interval that coincided with an 84 percent decline in the monarch population.”(164) But, their plight is not without hope. Ecologists, biologists, and citizens are coming alongside the monarch and planting milkweed, buying stretches of land, and working on gaining legal protection for them.
How are stories like this revealed in my work? In the piece A Communion of Subjects (2024) I am responding to concerns around threatened ecology and climate change. The artwork is atop a dining table. The table is set with twenty hand-crafted glass pieces that are etched with “subjects”. The viewer is invited to the table, to the conversation of these subjects. Two of the plates are devoted to the aforementioned monarch, showing the caterpillar on the milkweed, and a map showing both the roads and their migration path. In terms of imagery, animals interacting with the road is a prominent theme, but some other inhabitants chime in, like the conservation-reliant pupfish and the stressed (and usually silent) coral. Tea towels with curated texts from people devoted to spirituality with nature encourage the viewer to consider more deeply their relationships with the subjects . An inspiration booklet is provided for those who would like to know more about the ideas and the books that inspired the work. My hope is that A Communion of Subjects is an invitation to a table of conversation about wonder, love, grief and hope and that from this engagement knowledge, care and agency may unfold. The piece is on view in the Bryan Oliver Gallery through January.

Tuko Pamoja: Tanzanian Creativity and Perspectives in an Era of Climate Change is an experiential summer 2025 workshop for college and high school educators. It is offered by School for International Training with support from a Fulbright-Hays Group Project Abroad (GPA) grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

Starting in June 2025, SIT will welcome six college and six high school educators to Tanzania-Zanzibar. The goal of the workshop is to provide ways for educators to infuse African perspectives into U.S. classrooms and curricula when discussing climate change.

Tanzania-Zanzibar serves as a microcosm of the African continent, which makes it an ideal place to explore the creative and innovative ways urban and rural communities are responding to environmental changes.

"High-Collared" and "Habitat" will be on view at the Terrain event, October 5th and 6th, 2023.

Opening First Friday of December 2021

https://spokanearts.org/programs/chase-gallery/

Design and Fabrication, Fused Glass and Enamel

Commission of two pins for visiting speaker Dr. Madeleine Albright

http://www.inlander.com/spokane/flex-154-annual-manual.html

www.inlander.com/spokane/article-18701-…

www.inlander.com/spokane/article-18415-…

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/jan/05/art-class-teaches-creativity-with-community-in/

e-merge competition at Bullseye Glass in Portland,OR
http://www.bullseyeglass.com/emerge/

I have a show review in Sculpture magazine June 2009 issue, pp. 74-75.