Photo credit: Eric Moschopedis (cleverly shot through his binoculars unbeknownst to me).
I am interested in learning more about the nature of my relationship to the land I am intrinsically connected with, the subtle and explicit relations between us, grounding my process in an intimate exploration of entangled systems. My methodology is intimate, self-reflexive and phenomenological. Embracing embodied knowledge, I listen to, participate with, and learn from the more than-human-world we call Nature. Using traditional plein air painting, photography, video, sound recordings, and writing as both investigative devices and tools for immersive transcription, I am piecing together fragments, small movements and details in an exploratory fashion, all in search of a larger dance of embroiled elements that re-conceives our human and more-than-human relationships.
In a non-hierarchical and non-anthropocentric attempt to align myself with the rythms and tempos of the earth, I search for the locus of them in my immediate environment, and document them through plein air painting and video. I absorb and align with the gentle fluid movements I find in water (currently in rivers and wetland streams that run through my city) as the water interfaces with the earth, the wind (air), the light, and other lifeforms. Through my body and my materials, I perform these vibratory movements. It is in this manner that I come to understand the complexity of rhythms I experience in my surrounding environment. Moving them through my body is a way of processing and learning from them (Godoy and Leman, 8). The practice becomes a series of iterations through which I learn more about myself and the world I am intimately connected to.
I am currently located on the Confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers. It is situated in the very heart of Calgary, Canada on Treaty 7 land whose First Peoples I acknowledge with respect and gratitude for being the original caretakers of this marvellous place whose rhythms, movements and relationships are now a part of me and I of them. These original caretakers include the Blackfoot Confederacy of Siksika, Piikani, and Kanai First Nations, Tsuut’ina First Nation and the Stoney Nakoda (including the Chiniki, Bearspaw and Wesley First Nations), as well as the Métis Nation of Alberta Region III.