Works on Wood
Many of the works in this series debuted in the show Wooden & Earthen at the Crooked Tree Art Center in Traverse City, MI that ran from July 11th through August 22nd of 2025. Much of the works explore the duality of night and day, of sight and obscurity - what is visible and what is invisible or hidden. I like these inherent juxtapositions - that you can both know and not know at the same time. You can see and not know or you can understand intuitively and not know why or not be able to articulate it easily. We can easily be discouraged by not understanding and shut down or we can use it as an opportunity to learn. These metaphors - along with those of sky and land, heaven and earth form the basis for these compositions using the natural wood grain to guide the way. I am interested in the idea that we occupy physical bodies and experience the world viscerally - and yet we all have an inner dimension of emotion and respond on this level as well. I see this as an inherent psychology or spirituality - the space of the mind and body and how we resonate with each other and with the natural forms around us. I am interested in our ability to make meaning out of visual information. I am particularly enamored with the concept of pareidolia - how we see relationships in visual stimuli to find images in the clouds or in this case in the wood grain. When I was a kid, the rafters in my room above my bed were covered by sheets of OSB plywood and I remember spending countless amounts of time finding patterns, faces and shapes in the overlays. I was reminded of this (to my dismay) when we moved to our current home and my daughters were terrified by all of the “monster eyes” that were watching them from the walls of knotty pine panels.
I am interested in the questions: what attracts our attention? What sparks joy, awe, curiosity, desire? The visual information we consume affects our habits of seeing and perceiving and our inner lives. I connect most of these patterns to landscape or landform because of my appreciation of the natural beauty of our surroundings, but also knowing that these carry their own perceptions and meanings based on the frameworks we each bring to them. The natural world is an easy metaphor - a common language that carries many complex histories of its own. Working on wood is another direct reference to the natural world and gives me access to the inherent histories embedded in the material and the tradition of woodworking. The way that we each interpret the same information varies widely based on the experiences that we bring to them. Too often, these differences can divide us. Or we try to hide what we think or feel to avoid uncomfortable situations. I would like to propose that we allow ourselves the opportunities for dialogue and mutual discovery and I hope that my artwork can play a role in that.
My process fluctuates from project to project, but I see it as coming from different ends of the same spectrum of creativity - between image and object. Sometimes this breaks down as being more abstract or representational, but more often it has more to do with my process of making artwork. My image based work usually starts with a photograph that I have taken (or scene from life), then I pair it with a medium or material based on how I want the finished artwork to feel. Other times, I paint with oil or acrylic to achieve an image from everyday life to which I ascribe highly symbolic meaning. These images become containers to hold conversations that I would like to have or issues that I feel strongly about or want to learn from. My object based work starts with the material and allows the process of making to be responsive to its visual properties and inform the visual decision that I make. In both approaches, I allow these decisions to guide the final outcome, often surrendering my original vision of the artwork as I go. I often refer to this spectrum as either working “outside-in” or “inside out” with the goal of arriving somewhere in the middle where both the image and the object achieve a sense of purpose and cohesiveness.