Exploring Landscape and Home is part of a series of work on paper, panel, and collected panels.  Each piece is painted with acrylic gouache and drawn with acrylic markers and comprised of large and small patterns, objects, and symbols. These various images suggest a landscape, geography, home, or a community connection that, placed snugly with other images, forms the possibility of a quilt or landscape as viewed from above.  Whether a curved block of color indicating the corner of a crop field or a pattern taken from a grandmother’s apron, each small image works into a larger whole as a reminder of our interconnectedness with past, future, and present neighbor.

The series is really a continuation of a question I keep returning to: what can where and who we come from tell us about who we are? It is a question that, like most good questions, reveals more questions. I’m curious about the Christian idea of the communion of saints - small s, as in all of us - that is connected to us in the here and now and those who’ve gone before us.  For me, this lineage is made of people who have, as Kathleen Norris writes, “done the hard work of living in a place for a lifetime.” Similarly in landscape is the idea that we know who we are more deeply when we know where we are - the landscape we stand on and live from. John O’Donohue writes beautifully about the very real ways the landscape we come from shapes our minds and hearts.

Cataloguing patterns, objects, and symbols is for me a kind of map making, a means of way finding of who I am and where I come from that, at is best, informs where I’m directed. It is a way of grounding and finding of direction.

And possibly, if our feet are grounded in an understanding of the connection between place and those who began the weaving of our stories, we are better able to speak and live more fully from the landscape of the world and of the mind and into a community we’re called to build.