Selected features:

It’s Only (super)Natural. National juried exhibition. Gallery 130, University of Mississippi. Oxford, MS. February 24 - March 21, 2025.

This collage was made in February, 2020, just before the COVID-19 lockdown. I composed it in one sitting of roughly eight hours, using fragments of my previous work to create a new composition. This piece is currently being featured in the annual national juried exhibition at the University of Mississippi, an exhibition called It’s Only (super)Natural. The exhibition’s theme, the boundary between the natural and the super-natural, has encouraged me to think deeply about this work and the circumstances of its creation. Though this piece is abstract, I am struck by the image of a horizon within it. This was not an image that I intended to create, but one that emerged organically as I played with the relationships between the shapes, textures, and colors present in pieces of paper I had worked with and collected over many years. After a period of searching, this work “clicked” all at once — the horizon emerged, and the work felt finished. The horizon in this work emerged as the natural horizon so often does when fog clears or when walking through dense trees. When I look back on February 2020, the horizon of my life was never more obscured. I could not have imagined what was in store for the world. The COVID-19 pandemic was a phenomenon of a scope beyond anything I, or most other people, had ever experienced. It felt almost super-natural in its immensity. As human and capitalism-driven climate change brought on the environmental factors that facilitated the spread of COVID-19, the pandemic was, indeed, beyond the natural. Through climate change, humans have become a supernatural force, changing the way nature functions in profound ways. Considering this work in context of this exhibition’s theme, where the natural meets the supernatural, allows the idea of shaping nature to come full circle in this work. As I shaped a horizon through paper, without knowing what the future would bring, so do we continue to shape our environments on massive, incomprehensible scales. As we aim understand the effects of these actions, and try desperately to mitigate them, we will not know what is on the horizon until it is upon us.

This artist’s statement was written February 21, 2024 for the work’s inclusion in It’s Only (super)Natural.