Artist’s Statement

As the crickets’ soft autumn hum
is to us
so are we to the trees
as are they
to the rocks and the hills

-Gary Snyder

The creatures that share this world with us were once experienced as our equals. Humans turned in the cycle of life alongside animals, plants, and the earth itself. Gods were fashioned from the powerful and mysterious brother-animals that soared, crawled, or swam through man’s perception. Ancient people’s relationships with their world and their gods were navigated through ritual, through art and craft, and through song and dance. The profoundly mystical experience of existing was fed by the natural world in which people moved.

It may be that the new “environmental ethic” toward which so many environmental philosophers aspire – an ethic that would lead us to respect and heed not only the lives of our fellow humans but also the life and well-being of the rest of nature – will come into existence not primarily though the logical elucidation of new philosophical principles and legislative strictures, but through a renewed attentiveness to this perceptual dimension that underlies all our logics, through a rejuvenation of our carnal, sensorial empathy with the living land that sustains us.

– David Abrams

The Spell of the Sensuous

Today; we – modern, western, people – have developed a deep perception of ourselves that incontrovertibly alienates us from this reality. Consequently, we find ourselves in the middle of a great, mass extinction. My work marks a calling back to that feeling of the mystical or mythical – respect, and even reverence, for Gaia – Mother Earth, and these creatures that are no longer an integral part of our understanding of the world, countless many of whom are in fact being driven, as a direct consequence of man’s new place in the world, to their final extinction.

The animal envoys of the Unseen Power no longer serve, as in primeval times, to teach and to guide mankind…Neither in body nor in mind do we inhabit the world of these hunting races of the Paleolithic millennia, to whose lives and life we nevertheless owe the very forms of our bodies and structures of our minds.  Memories of their animal envoys still must sleep, somehow, within us; for they wake a little and stir when we venture into darkness.

– Joseph Cambell

The Way of the Animal Powers

It is the mythical that awakens these memories and prompts a global empathy. I approach my work with a kind of open-mindedness, and the fullness of each piece’s message is often only belatedly revealed. It is my great hope that, through this continued dialogue with my works, I may find ways to reconnect people with the mystical in themselves, as that force of life that we only truly glimpse when we associate with the “Other” of our more-than-human brotherhood.