What Once Was the Sea is Now a Desert 2023
My work has long been influenced by geology and the West Texas landscape that I am native to. The landscape and its flora and fauna inform a large part of my worldview. In 1997 I spent six months traveling in Australia. While there I was able to snorkel on the Great Barrier Reef, this was a transformative experience for a native of a semi-desert land. The profusion of plant and animal life and color affected me in a quite but profound way.
Back at the ranch where I have lived both before and since that time, I have experienced a series of droughts, which have brought climate change to my door in a very immediate way.
As a child growing up on the land living at the ranch I would find fossils of seashells on hillsides evidencing that the place where I was standing, 3000 feet above sea level, was once under water. As I grew older and traveled, observing the unfolding landscapes before me, I would internalize new forms that my travels present to me.
This new body of work being presented in “What once was the Sea is now a Desert” is a synthesis of the forms I have experienced in my living in, and moving about the world. Living through drought and watching the plant life on the ranch wither and become less productive. Watching the animals shed flesh and be sold prematurely for slaughter to ease the burden on the land. To be forced to acknowledge the impact we humans are having on our environment and deal directly with the consequence of our success as a species. “…Sea and Desert” imagines a rusted and monochrome world as desiccated as a desert but with ancient geologic forms merged with recent skeletal reefs and marine forms; a new landscape horrible, but beautiful in its own way.