The Lost Fields
The works contained in "The Lost Fields" explore the idea of landscape, lost spaces and fields, and the memory of plants and places. As the urban environment expands; roadsides, field edges and untended right of ways are the places where species migrate and create small ecosystems before they are managed and transformed into new uses. Preserving the moment into paper is a way of making “a surveyor’s map” of my “lost fields and meadows…” both of my own semi-tended garden and of the places I’ve wandered.
The structure, symmetry and growth pattern of plant life has always informed my work. Paper is often thought of as a substrate, but it can also be a container. As I arrange the plant or flower in wet pulp, I’m visualizing the field around the plant. As the pulp dries, the finished piece preserves the plant in a moment and becomes the space around the plant. These works were inspired by botanical illustrations, herbals, and herbariums, the various ways plants were arranged in pages to preserve plants and to contain knowledge of the plant world.