Artist Statement

My conceptual, research-based practice draws from fieldwork, walking, performance, installation, social practices, and site-specific art to present an enchanted system for engaging with the histories, ecologies, and traces of the Frontier West. I ask: what happens when we engage with the land and its constituents using an epistemology that prioritizes chance, myth, and the mystical, allowing the land, and my own body, to remain esoteric and wild? I present a way of making that reveals the persistence of magic and nature's agency, countering the sequestration of magic in favor of logic. Intuition evokes something beyond the mundane notion that sensing and feeling must be rationalized. I assert that only through these forces of chance, trace, and mysticism can we make anything meaningful at all. I engage with the occult and folk traditions of the Frontier West as they combine with my Irish-American heritage through the divination practices of rhabdomancy (dowsing), tasseography (dregs), and lithomancy (stones). These occult practices allow me to survey the landscape through my intimate connection to place. My dowsing rods guide me through the landscape, serving as a connection to an oracle that points me in myriad directions. I accumulate data through sensors and sensings as the land inscribes itself upon my body. I use these traces of dust, mud, blood, grass, sap, and thorns to divine messages from the land itself that can inform my future interactions with a site as I catch faint glimpses of its obscured constituents. As an artist, writer, and researcher, my practice considers how often invisible aspects of place affect our interactions with it. Through this work, I engage with a strange geology of sticky affective deposits layering and coagulating to produce an intimate and haunted understanding of place that embraces the mundane, the overlooked, and the mystical as vital forces which coat and erode our landscapes with a persistence rivaling the erratic monsoons and prairie winds.