Memory of a Larger Mind

A rapidly retreating glacier alongside a former copper mine — ecological loss and industrial extraction in direct proximity. Visited as part of the Wrangell Mountains Center residency (2022).

High Arctic archipelago and surrounding ocean islands, visited as part of The Arctic Circle residency (2023). Site of research and photography. Rocks, bones, seaweed, and debris collected from places covered for eons by glaciers — now uncovered, like wounds with their scabs ripped off. Materials document accelerating ecological loss across an ocean rising faster than almost anywhere on earth.

Source of the Ana River — the sole water source for Summer Lake, threatened by groundwater depletion. Site of feldmestn-inspired walks and ecological fieldwork.

Once Guild's Lake — a 250-acre riparian marsh drained for industry in 1913. Memory Lake (2024–2025) refills it drop by drop with foraged pigments and watershed waters.

The Clackamas River Basin drains the western slopes of Mount Hood and the High Cascades. In 2020, the Riverside Fire burned over 138,000 acres across the watershed — one of the most destructive fires in Oregon's recent history — leaving altered hydrology, mass soil erosion events, and a dramatically changed plant community. The basin is also deeply implicated in the region's water supply and in the history of Indigenous land use along the Columbia plateau. Foraging and research underway.

Mount Adams is Washington's second-highest peak and one of the most heavily glaciated volcanoes in the Cascades. Its glaciers are in rapid retreat. The mountain is sacred to the Yakama Nation, whose treaty rights to the mountain's huckleberry fields and surrounding forest have been contested and diminished since the 1855 Yakama Treaty. The convergence of sacred Indigenous land and accelerating ecological loss makes this site a concentrated example of the project's core concerns. Pigment work for this project is in progress.

Mount Hood is an active stratovolcano and Oregon's highest peak. Its glaciers are disappearing rapidly: as a co-author of Disappearing Glaciers of the Oregon Cascades (Carlson et al., Annals of Glaciology, 2025), I have spent years documenting this loss through field observation — half of Oregon's named Cascade glaciers have disappeared, almost disappeared, or are critically endangered in the 21st century. The New Earth painting series (2017–2025) began here, its shapes traced from satellite imagery of glacial retreat — that work led directly to Memory of a Larger Mind. New pigment work for this project is in progress.

The deepest river gorge in North America holds multiple overlapping histories of violence. In 1877, the Nez Perce were forcibly removed from the Wallowa Valley — ten years before thirty-four Chinese gold miners were ambushed, murdered, and thrown into the Snake River at what is now Chinese Massacre Cove, the worst massacre of Chinese people by whites in the United States. No one was held accountable. Three dams, completed between 1960 and 1967, blocked salmon migration permanently. Snake River salmon are now approaching functional extinction. Pigments made from the region's wildflowers, weeds, rocks, bones, and river water as part of the Palettes of Place / Oregon Origins Project (2024–2025). New work for this project is in progress.

The Willamette River, which runs through the heart of Portland, is a federally designated Superfund site — one of the largest in the country — due to decades of industrial contamination including PCBs, heavy metals, and pesticides concentrated in the river sediments. The Portland Harbor Superfund site spans 10 miles of the lower river. The Willamette also flows through land historically belonging to the Kalapuya people, whose removal the Oregon Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 formalized. Foraging and research underway.

Minidoka War Relocation Center operated from 1942 to 1945, incarcerating over 13,000 Japanese Americans. Located on high desert scrubland in the Snake River Plain, Minidoka held people primarily from Seattle, Portland, and western Oregon. Conditions were harsh: extreme heat and cold, dust storms, inadequate shelter. A National Historic Site since 2008. The camp's sagebrush flats and volcanic basalt mesa now hold the remains of the barracks, gardens, and ponds that incarcerees built and tended as acts of survival and cultural continuity. Foraging and research underway.

Nyssa, in eastern Oregon’s Treasure Valley, was the site of the first Japanese American farm labor camp of World War II. From May to November 1942, incarcerees recruited mainly from the Portland Assembly Center worked the sugar beet fields. Repurposed whiskey distilleries and industrial refineries converted the raw sugar beet juice into ethanol, which served as a foundational chemical precursor for manufacturing munitions and weapons. The labor camps represent one of the least-documented aspects of Japanese American incarceration — the use of imprisoned people as agricultural labor. Workers volunteered, but they were choosing from inside confinement. Their labor saved Malheur County’s 1942 sugar beet crop. Foraging and research for this site is underway.

The Pacific International Livestock Exposition grounds in North Portland served as an Assembly Center during World War II, used by the U.S. government to incarcerate over 3,600 Japanese Americans between May and September 1942 before their forced transfer to inland incarceration camps. People were held in livestock stalls. The site operated under Executive Order 9066, which forcibly displaced approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. Foraging and research underway.

Tule Lake War Relocation Center and Segregation Center operated from 1942 to 1946 — the largest, most heavily guarded, and most contested of the ten WRA camps. Those who answered "no" to loyalty questionnaire questions, who protested conditions, or who were deemed disloyal were transferred here from other camps. At its peak, over 18,700 people were held behind barbed wire and military tanks. Tule Lake became a site of organized resistance and strike actions; it also became the site of renunciation of citizenship under coercive conditions. The surrounding landscape — a drained lakebed of volcanic tuff and sagebrush — holds this layered history of forced displacement, resistance, and contested belonging. Foraging and research underway.

Former Nazi death camp and extermination center. Both grandmothers survived Auschwitz. The camp at Birkenau was built as an extension — its iron scraps and limestone enter into dialogue with materials from the Arctic and Oregon. Pigments gathered from the sites bear witness to what written records cannot fully hold.

Small city in Transylvania where my matrilineal ancestors lived for generations. Site of research, photography, and pigment-gathering connected to my family history of forced displacement.

Former concentration and forced labor camp in which all four of my grandparents were imprisoned. Site of ongoing pigment-making workshops in collaboration with FestivALT. Pigments sourced: ground elder, crown vetch, limestone, iron.

Forty acres of meadow and forest — a former apple orchard killed by invasive fungus. Pigments made from the meadow, which is critical bird habitat, and from the artist's mother's flower garden, a spectral place made in the company of her memories.