FEATURED WORK:

Escape From Hot Earth

I’m really excited to have 12 images from my series Escape from Hot Earth appearing in the upcoming publication of The Southern Indiana Review. This is a series of digital collage and mixed media images exploring a mythological visual narrative that imagines a dystopian earth on fire and the intervention of divine feminine energy as the restorer of balance, nature, and spirit. Images in the series touch on themes of climate change, the dangerous complacency of a “thoughts and prayers” culture, self-reflection, and escapism, through a surrealist and sci-fi lens.

In these images, familiar architypes offer prayers, worry, and tears. A mysterious and powerful figure is embodied by an astronaut suited version of Sekhmet, the Egyptian goddess of the sun, war, destruction, plagues and healing. She arrives to intervene and usher the last children on earth to safety. These children, now sainted and supernaturally protected by botanical armor, are spirited away to inhabit another planet that is lush, beautiful, and unspoiled by racial discrimination, violence, and environmental catastrophe.

Any mythology offers clues about the aspirations of the storyteller and audience as situated in a particular society, place, and time. I hope to create images that move people and that facilitate shared experience, empathy, and a sense of urgency at a time of environmental and social crisis. This is a time for radical intervention, imagination, creativity, and action.

Many of these images leverage digitized versions of Henry David Thoreau’s pressed plant specimens. These specimens are being studied to understand how climate change has effected their decline. Thank you to the Harvard University Herbaria for making digitizations of Thoreau's herbarium specimens public domain so that they can be featured in art as prominently as they have been in science.