Palettes of Place
Ongoing companion project · 2017–present
What memories do places hold? How do we access them? In places where violence has occurred, how do we transmute difficult memories toward more peaceful futures?
This work involves collaborating with places vibrantly alive — wildernesses, urban parks, alpine meadows — as well as places on the edges of life: clear cuts, concentration camps, and dying glaciers. In these places, I listen and 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 that transformation might offer insight or healing to viewers and to the human and other-than-human inhabitants of a place.
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, write and think with them, paint with them, and create something new.
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. I hope it has also shifted those of my ancestors, viewers, and the inhabitants of the places themselves.
2025
Coastal Ecotone
Made of the northern Oregon Coast's flowers, berries, fungi, lichen, stones, cones, seeds, bones, fossilized spruce cones, and shells. Foraged from the Hoffman Center's Wonder Garden in Manzanita, Oregon, and from surrounding forests, shorelines, meadows, clearcuts, and roadsides. Pigments mixed with rainwater, creekwater, and ocean water.
As I was making this body of work, I had a suspicion that painting on silk would feel like painting on water — which made sense, to reflect this supremely watery place. I was right. Silk is smooth as an ebb tide and strong as a king tide. Its memory is infallible, like water's.
I allowed myself to lean into sensory immersion and beauty in this work, guided by the lush bioregion that inspired it.
Materials
Alder · Alectoria lichen · Basalts · Bitter Cherry · Blue glass · Cascara · Ceanothus · Copper · Coreopsis · Devil's Club · Elderberry · Elk Bone · Goldenrod · Horse Chestnut · Horsetail · Huckleberry · Iris (wild and domesticated) · Iron · Lupine · Madder · Marigold · Oceanspray · Ochres · Oregon Grape · Paint fungus (Echinodontium tinctorium) · Queen Anne's Lace · Rhododendron · Rust · Saskatoon · Scotch Broom · Shore Pine · Tansy · Vivianite (fossilized spruce cone) · Wallflower · Walnut · White Rockrose · White Yarrow · Wild mustard · Woad · Wolf lichen
Exhibition
"Palette of Place: Coastal Ecotone"
Hoffman Center for the Arts · Manzanita, OR · 2025 (solo)
2023
Johnson Creek, Portland OR
For years, I lived in a house in Southeast Portland built on top of the now-buried headwaters of Johnson Creek — one of the major watersheds of the Willamette Valley. I didn't know the creek was under my house. No visible traces of it remain above ground. But headwaters kept appearing in my dreams. Historical maps helped me understand why, and led to the creation of this palette.
All of these colors were foraged from urban alleyways, "vacant" lots (which are anything but vacant), and sidewalks of this region. The water used to turn the pigments to watercolor paints is rainwater collected in my backyard and creekwater from Johnson Creek.
This work offers a reminder that nature isn't just "out there" in pristine, wild places. You and I are nature, and our cities are nature too. Our self-interest is indistinguishable from the self-interest of all other forms of life.
Made in connection with CETI's Postcards from a Climate Resilient Future
Materials
Urban forageables from Southeast Portland alleyways, vacant lots, and sidewalks · Rainwater (backyard) · Johnson Creek water
Exhibition
"Postcards from a Climate Resilient Future" Portland State University· Portland, OR · 2023