“What we most need to do is to hear within us the sound of the earth crying.”
- Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh
As an artist, I am drawn to examine both the exhilaration and tranquility I find in the beauty of the natural world, particularly the unique cliffs and beaches on the Pacific coastline near Los Angeles, California. Collages from the Edge explores my primal connection to these places, mingling the joy that I have felt near the ocean since childhood with the sorrow that the effects of global warming threaten to destroy them.
I reimagine a future without these places by making conceptual collages from prints of my photographs. I physically reassemble fragments of waves, surfers, beachcombers and sunsets to create scenes of chaos. Cutting up my prints and destroying my careful compositions heightens my feelings of personal loss and sorrow. As a lifelong movie lover and camera operator on films and television shows, the work is a nod to classic movies and cartoons from my childhood that depicted natural disasters as mythic monsters where huge fissures from earthquakes swallowed up entire cities.
Collages from the Edge describes the various emotional states during a precarious time, but it also calls attention to what will be lost. It is my hope that these collages will provoke an emotional, visceral response in the viewer. Only by letting myself connect to places that have sustained me throughout my life, have I begun to really absorb the fact that they are a part of me that may be destroyed.