Artist Statements tell the viewer more about the artist and their work, in particular their thinking process.
This is the statement that accompanied my recent exhibition.
Uprooted: Creating A Dialog with Plants
Uprooted…rootless…displaced…transplanted
The central force of my current work is the transformation of human emotion into two and three dimensional forms, using plant based handmade papers. Uprooted is the result of a major move from my community of 27 years and the resulting feelings I experienced.
In October of 2000, having sold my city of Kalamazoo home of many years, I left the only house I had ever owned and move to rural Allegan County to a small town of 1,400 residents. Although this was a change I had initated and welcomed, I found myself unexpectedly grieving the loss of home, neighborhood and community. I experienced difficulties in dealing with the loss of friends, active memberships in various organizarions and connections in my business community. I felt uprooted and rootless…as if I was a plant torn out of the ground from its roots and transplanted into foreign soil.
As a woman, I no longer had my support system of friends. As a writer, I no longer had my contacts at the Kalamazoo Gazette and my venue for writing where I had written freelance for most of thirty years. As an art photographer, I lost my primary source for artistic support, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. As an exhibiting artist, I no longer had access to exhibiting opportunities and grants funding from the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo. As a gardener, where previously I had work clay soil, I now worked sand and where I once planted for cool shade there is now wind, heat and sun.
I was displaced.
In order to accept these changes as well as to endeavor to become deeply rooted in the place I now lived, I began to work the land; digging beds, moving earth, stones, plants and making compost for my gardens. I created new beds for flowers, herbs, vegetables, and perennial plants. I began spending as much time as possible in my garden creating a place of beauty, solace and healing.
Eight years later, I realize that my turning to the earth was an unconscious therapeutic process that allowed not only for a tranformation of self but a new beginning.
As part of making this 5-acre plot of land my own, I began to use the native plants in my artwork that I found in my yard, and meadow, as well as nearby woodlot and roadside. I collected and processed raw materials and turned them into pulp for handmade papers.
Always a kinesthetic person, the act of cutting, soaking, drying, cooking, chopping and pounding the plant materials became a metaphor for my transformation as well. As I gathered and use the abndant plants materials from my new rural home I realize that I was tentatively marking the land with my scent and imprinting my fingerprints into the landscape.
As I began to take root in this new soil I also began to accept my new life and found myself this lands steward. I named it. I planned and participated in a land blessing ceremony. As the years progressed. I planted a “Monarch Butterfly Waystation” and achieved a “National Wildlife Certified Landscape” certification. I landscaped around our ranch home, planted a large vegtable garden that blesses us with organic food.
Eight years later, I still feel compelled to work the land and spend as much as 6 to 8 hour a day seasonally, in my garden. I continue to garden, landscape, and transform the land creating a healthier and more beautiful place than before.
I recently embarked on a study of the Bach Flower Essence system. What I have learned is that not only are flowers the reproductive organ of the plants, the vibrational energy of flowers is faster and more refined than the vibrational level of human energy. Flowers therefore have the ability to aid in the healing of humans and animals. In addition, when a flowers rate of vibration matches something missing in human energy, the plant can work to replace the energy that is needed.
Withoutr realizing it then, I find that I am naturally drawn to plants as healers and that working with flowers has aligned and balanced needs I have as a human who was struggling.
