What memories do places hold? How do we access those memories? In places where violence has occurred, how do we transmute the place's difficult memories to more peaceful futures? What role do humans play in the enlivening restive powers? How can we move those restive powers, and how can their movement contribute to social change? My writing and visual art is guided by these questions. My work involves collaborating with places that are vibrantly alive such as wildernesses and urban parks as well as place on the edges of life such as clear cuts, concentration camps, alpine meadows, and dying glaciers. In these places, I listen and I forage flowers, rocks, bones, and wild waters to create pigments and I write. The result is palettes of place assembled from poetry, prose and color. The pigments and waters of a place offer a direct line to a place’s memory. My work explores how those memories might be transformed, and how their transformation might offer insight or healing to viewers and to the human and other-than-human inhabitants of a place. Each place is unique but is dependent upon and intimately connected to every other place. So this work, while place-based, is ultimately about this place we all share: the earth. The intent and origin of this work is both personal and universal. Its ultimate goal is transformation: from grief to love, loneliness to connection, trauma to healing.  ​Traumas live on like stars — in people and in places. We feel their effects long after their ends. ​Making palettes of place has transformed my own memories, and I hope it's also shifted those of my ancestors, viewers, and the inhabitants of the places themselves.  In my studio, one wall is lined with shelves holding glass vials of pigments made from materials foraged from all over the world: an archive of memories and potentials. The vivid gold of my mother’s marigolds in Vermont sits next to the pale green of ground elder from Płaszów, a concentration camp in Poland where my grandparents were imprisoned. I can hold these vials in my hand, I can write and think with them, I can paint with them and create something new.