STATEMENT

My work illuminates the overlooked and invisible through exploration of discarded landscapes and hidden worlds of science and nature. After years of documenting industrial and urban landscapes via oil painting, I began to work directly with scientists on art-science collaborations. These collaborations, while interesting and fulfilling on their own, exposed me to the realities of climate change in a way that was impossible not to confront in my work. In 2016, while working on a project to document snow microbiology in the Finnish Arctic, the snow melted weeks ahead of schedule and I was unable to complete a planned second set of paintings. In 2018, while I was studying data visualization and learning about climate warming stripes, a UN report was released which tried to raise the alarm—that we had mere years, not decades, to reduce carbon production drastically if we want to avoid the worst effects of climate change. A year later, I went to Utqiagvik, Alaska to do art outreach as part of an NSF-funded project. The project turned out to be teaching local fifth-graders about the science of Arctic sea ice loss and how that was affecting their local community. This was yet another moment of reckoning and these three experiences have led me to reluctantly accept that climate change is no longer a vague threat that lies decades in the future. It is here now and I am now creating work that deals with the new age in which we find ourselves—the Anthropocene.