Mythos & Late Winter at Marlatt

In his 1973 essay “Frederick Law Olmstead and the Dialectical Landscape,” Robert Smithson wrote: “We cannot take a one-sided view of the landscape … [A particular place] can no longer be seen as ‘a thing-in-itself,’ but rather as a process of ongoing relationships existing in a physical region … ”

I explore these ongoing relationships through my drawing practice and personal lens of the tallgrass prairie ecosystem. The prairie has a history of being shaped and carved by both climate and people, but it also embodies resilience: a healthy prairie is diverse, interdependent, responsive to trauma, and has roots that reach as far into the Earth as the tallgrass reaches to the sky. In my work, I apply and build up marks that reference both visual and psychological forms, playing with the expectations of traditional landscape representation. I place both myself and the viewer within the landscape and invite a personal process of orientation and navigation that begins in the middle.