Artist statement
I use digital means to reactivate analog processes, creating hybrid images that continue my inquiry into spaces in flux. For the past 15 years, I’ve made work using photographs I’ve taken at botanical, medicinal, and community gardens.The three pieces included in “Seeing Truth” engage photos from dormant and growing seasons at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, an institution that began as Louis XIII’s personal medicinal garden; became a scientific and botanical research center in the eighteenth century; and remains part of the intertwined histories of Western science, colonial appropriation, and trade—a key player in the transportation, classification, and separation of plants, humans, and other creatures. My eye was drawn there to educational diagrams of clades, and to the shapes of drains, concrete flower beds, and manmade ponds, as well as to vegetal matter.
My process involves creating multiples; positioning and re-photographing prints (outdoors, and in my studio on floral patterned rugs, which were historically conceived of as indoor gardens); combining printed images with live and dried flowers; working continually with color—both digitally and by painting and drawing directly on prints—to build layers of possibility. Color for me is itself animate, and in complex conversation with the histories of botany, medicine, human violence, and the pursuit of beauty.
Natural, General, and Peculiar History, “34” x 25”, 2018, archival photo print on aluminum
Plant Messengers, “16” x 12”, 2019, archival photo print on wood
The Garden Politic, “16” x 12”, 2018, archival photo print on wood
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