There Are Fish In the Trees

This series of work began with the abstracted landscape shapes I always find myself doodling and drawing. The images are drawn from sketches on scraps of paper, landscapes snapped on my iPhone, and watching the land around here roll along on long highway drives. The South Dakota landscape is mash up of mountainous lines, short grass prairie, rolling farmland, and long rivers. There are few definitive lines between these land forms, and so it is in my own mind: They mash together and I sometimes think of all those landscapes as quilted together. I began to play, filling these squashed up landscapes with patterns and forms representing the people and places that have influenced me.

The first initial lines of this series suggest landscape as they are placed on mix media paper, then filled with acrylic gouache. When the land has appeared I am free to fill each space with patterns and forms. In this series, the filled in spaces are representative of identity: there are the dainty flowers I remember most from the clothes my mom made, the rainbows and the hearts I first learned to draw for Dad; there are repetitive lines that I first found in a Design 101 class and have never let go of; and of course, there are the fish in the trees that appeared as I considered my Scandinavian grandparents’ love of fishing, but also the values of welcome, tolerance, and humility.

Filling in these landscapes that I am so tied to with the people and places that have so gently but consistently influenced and shaped me is a centering practice that becomes a way of contemplatively seeing the unity and connection in the land, but also a lens with which to see the unity and connection among those around me. There Are Fish In the Trees is a visual representation of the quilted and connected land, and the quilted and connected influences that bind together to create a person, a family, a community.