Pattern and predictability, color, motion, and time have always been consistent and iconic design communicators in my visual work. Permanence and fragility offer balancing counterweights in my messaging.
My professional arts background (BFA- MICA, Johns Hopkins, MFA- Cranbrook, in printmaking, cartography and political science) currently functions in an environmental role as creator and steward, participant and observer. In this particular set of documentary photos, with self-grown artfully arranged organic vegetables, I exist as a joyful minx, as well as nostalgic record-keeper.
I cleaned out poisoned soils for 30 years in Baltimore, Detroit and now York, creating cooling green spaces throughout urban heat islands, these now restored sites function as carbon sequestering banks and nutrition generators for people and creatures. Urban areas long neglected now provide pleasing vistas, healthy invigorating experiences, and introspective moments, where we are free to be amazed at often overlooked beauties of our natural world. Something as small as a beautifully shaped, colorful vegetable can hold the promise of a hopeful future, exist as a pleasing and whimsical visual art image, as well as signal loss and nostalgia for what we once took for granted. Seen here as art, the lowly common vegetable rises to an elevated role, as icon of a once thriving history, that promised a future.
My work, when critiqued in this manner, functions as warning, enticement, and mournful trigger.