Redrawn Topographies: Human and Wild Imprints on the Land

Moving from a large metro area 15 years ago to Montana, my studio work began reflecting my concerns about the increasingly fragmented ecosystem of the Rocky Mountain West. My paintings continue to search for and incorporate an abstract language to express the dissonance between nature and human development.

Subdivisions, street grids, agricultural fields, wind turbines, highways, fences, power lines, and other manmade interventions—expressed through rectilinear patterning in my paintings—are increasingly disrupting the ancient routes of wild movement. On the uppermost layers of current paintings, curvilinear gestures reference the migratory movement of animals such as elk, pronghorn, and mule deer. Driven by the search for forage, this seasonal force is critical to wildlife abundance, even altering the landscape in interconnected ways. But beyond that, wild migration is a wonder of nature, to me a quasi-mystical phenomenon that inspires my work above all else.

My paintings are multi-layered—built up to create impressions of map-like aerial landscapes. Geometric, hard-edged bands of colors, set in a paper-white ground, connote the human imprint on the ground. Drawing and redrawing abstracted and imagined wildlife trails, I explore varieties of mark making and texture to indicate direction, dispersal, and regrouping.