These paintings are made of stones, plants, and wild waters. These materials contain the earth’s memory. Each round shape in this work is an ecosystem in flux, in crisis, in homeostasis. The painting is their ecosystems linked.

The circles can also be seen as stone-shapes. Stones are the material embodiment of Jewish mourning (one puts a stone on a Jewish grave, not flowers). The shape's repetition is the trace of my process of transmuting intergenerational and planetary grief to wonder.

The circles are also zeros.  The zero is infinity, a site where our capacity for logic fails and something else takes hold. These zeros teem with nothingness and multitudes, grief and love.

 

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As a 3G Jew and the daughter of immigrants, I daily experience the residue of what I did not live but which lives in my body. Much of my art is driven by the need to transform this grief to beauty and love. Working with stone and plant pigments is an embodied way to do this. When I’m painting with these pigments, I experience the original entity’s “memory” of its biological history.

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I have learned to feel these “memories” in the painting process. Some pigments are heavier and will sink rather than flow. Some are eager to combine with other pigments, some vehemently resist combining. Some dominate other pigments, some go quiet. My role in these works is to translate these vital memories into a new vitality: a work of art. To do this, I enter an exchange between what the earth’s memory asks of me and what I ask of it. The painting is a record of that inter-asking.

 

To know the stones, flowers, and water in this way is to connect to the regenerative intelligence of the earth itself, allowing me to smooth some of the knots trauma has wrought in my lineage.

 

I’m trying, in this work, to love radically outward, backward and forward in time and space. I'm trying to make home-places for my ancestors. Sometimes it seems to work.