A HYMN TO LIFE AND LAND

I paint my love for our wounded yet enduring world, in colours and shapes borrowed from the Earth. Working with acrylic and ink on wood panel, I build up layers like sediments. Then I scratch and sand, scouring and damaging the surface, laying bare our colonialist history of erasure, displacement, and desecration. From there, I paint over the scars with shapes and lines that curve into and around each other, evoking the feminine, the relational, and the endlessly creative. 

With these overlaid forms, I celebrate nature’s capacity to respond, redirect, and regenerate despite all we throw at, and rip from, her. In my paintings, the landscapes and ocean-scapes will not be buried or controlled. They push through, laying proud flesh over the scars of extraction and abuse, and transforming the scratched and tangled lines into paths of connection. 

The dominant culture tells us that nature is outside of us, an inert resource to be exploited and consumed. It fails to mention what Indigenous people have always known: that we are part of this living world we damage. My work speaks to the horror of the Anthropocene, challenging us to witness the scars we leave on the earth and the scars such violence leaves in us, for we are part of what we destroy, and what we destroy is part of us. 

Yet, as much as my work is a cry of outrage, it is also a hymn to life; an invitation to remember the truth of our interconnectedness with all living beings and to reinstate respect and reciprocity for our Earth that gives us everything.