Into the Wonder: Cabinet of Curiosities, Husson College, Robert E. White Gallery, Bangor, Maine

Many aspects of my work are about the desecration of landscape, of Earth: the ruined garden. Drawing from evidence of changes in cultural geography and employing installations through painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography, I have developed a practice that concentrates on matters of environmental space.

Being witness to continuum of man-made landscape has led me to depict reminders of natural environment loss. In this exhibition, the installation focuses on our natural world, with some everyday objects, particularly marine life, and debris, and the importance of corals, and our increased daily awareness of climate change.

Interrupted forests, abandoned or temporarily placed objects in landscape, and debris found on Maine’s ocean beaches, trash left in parking lots and National Parks, and along our highways, encroachment, and technology in rural landscape have all become part of my investigation. The search takes the form of walking, and gathering and collecting evidence, comprised of complex labeling and identification of materials, to help create my work.

In my printmaking, in the library and gallery, through subtle symbolism of trajectories and scars across a tortured landscape, and use of discarded consumer and industrial goods as templates for printmaking, my work focuses primarily on primordial origins, void, and chaos; all of which I interpret as fragments of a “vanishing” earth.

In the installation, in the gallery, the sculpture armatures are made from marine debris, and roadside trash, including industrial blue foam, plastic bottles, and then completed with Magic-Sculpt, and painted with highly, fluorescent paint, and then exhibited under blacklight.

The impact of human culture on the landscape, and tourism of New England, and its coastline leading to Acadia National Park, has helped to further emphasize my intent – to provoke gently, how we quickly become accustomed to man-made landscape, no longer pristine – nor “wild”. Let us all be fully aware of the world we live in, and take care of it!
Into the Wonder: Cabinet of Curiosities - Husson College Robert E. White Gallery