When I was a kid my dad bought a piece of land in rural Maryland and moved the family to a cinderblock hut he built on the property. Bored and with no TV (he put a .45 through it) my brother and I were forced out into the woods surrounding our makeshift home. Here we spent innumerable hours pillaging the woods and the small creek that ran through it. We discovered and then plundered boneyards and burn pits. I spent a lot of time trying to disappear, and would bury myself under the mulching carpet of leaves while looking up at the oscillating convex of old growth oaks trees above me.

 

Years later, reading about Vasarely and “internal, infinite geometry,” I understood the relationship between the line drawings I had been making and my own cannibalization of personal history-the canopy of limbs above me and the formal vortex of snarled roots underneath me, out of sight. Trying not to be too obvious or sentimental about the suspension bridge of adolescence (remembering the mantillas of limbs and roots), my intention now is to find a more rational way to disguise these spaces without being swallowed up by thickets of twists and forks.

 

The line making started as small pen and ink drawings of imagined structures, and after an EDELO residency in Chiapas, Mexico, the mark making quickly evolved into tape when I needed the lines to be more pure and less wobbly. This allowed me to support and compress the structures in the drawings. I think there’s a huge gift given by the Eastern philosophies in the idea of interconnectedness. Interdependency. That nothing stands by itself. Things only stand because other things have helped them out.

 

The ladder and scaffolds have become my totems, and some kind of metaphor, although I don’t quite yet know for what.  There is a safe functional geometry in their making, something about a point of view or observation.