Yahara

Beneath our feet, stories are compressed in stone.
The elements have shaped and quieted
layers upon layers of rock, fossil, and
history below the surface.

There is potential buried in origins: in the earth, the places, and the stories we take for granted. Unearthing digs into what lies beneath the surface and the history those layers hold. It unfolds across three interconnected threads - Of Earth, Of Place, and Of Myth - each a different entrance into the same inquiry.

A Note on the Poetry
Several works in Unearthing are accompanied by short poems, each written in conversation with a specific piece. Time, Banded and Buried opens this statement. Others belong to the same impulse: to unearth what is buried, to listen, and to retell that encounter in language. These poems are not explanations of the visual work but parallel meditations, language rooted in the same source.

This project grew organically. Exploring the characteristics of different watercolor pigments led to mulling my own mineral-based paints. Time spent hiking and foraging for minerals led to driftwood and water collection. Gaining an appreciation for these natural materials led to weaving crystal beads into my fiber works. Researching each crystal’s esoteric and historic uses led to revisiting classical myths and their explanations of the natural world. Unearthing refuses linear resolution, trusting instead the branching connections these wonderings forge. It is a practice of quiet discoveries, re-enchantment, and the stories that stick with us.

Of Earth grounds itself in geological beauty. These works feature crystal beads and paints made from mineral pigments, hand-mulled in my studio. Many of the stones I grind into pigment I also stitch as beads into my fiber works, creating a material loop where stone becomes color and texture, paint and adornment. This thread began with a single question: What is in my paints? In unmaking the commercial paint tube, I not only gained a more intricate relationship to my materials, but was released from my fear of wasting my “good” paints. I now paint with a mix of studio-made and commercially made paints on cotton paper, the same fiber with which I warp my loom, trusting that no experiment is wasted when everything holds potential.

Fragment Collages

Just Beyond the Hills

Rewilding

Meditation on Violets

Shielded by Intuition

Ease My Clouded Mind

Time, Banded and Buried

In the Moment

Up and Out

More Than You Know

Color Warping

Of Place gathers memories of specific landscapes. Some works are painted en plein air while I’m onsite, using water directly from the source: a waterfall, a lake, a stream. Others are woven in-studio using ethically sourced materials from places I’ve visited: driftwood foraged from shorelines, stones collected on hikes, feathers and sticks gathered by hand, perfect for mark-making. Each piece is imbued with the essence of its origin, not as literal representation but as material witness. The place is in the work, not just depicted by it.

Niagara

The Warmth Between

Lake Georg(ia)

Walden Pond

Time, Banded and Buried

Walden Woods

Wearable Art

Of Myth turns to the stories told by the ancients that still hold footing today, about the origins of the world and our place within it. These works are meditations on inherited myths, retold through an abstracted, autobiographical lens. I return to Persephone, Demeter, Daphne, locating my own experiences as daughter, mother, survivor, making sense of power and struggles, theirs and my own. These are not faithful reproductions but critical retellings, stories deconstructed and rebuilt to hold a contemporary self.