“Within the patterns of natures we search for the traces of the human.”
- Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
As a child, the daughter of mountaineers, I traced the alpine landscape with my feet; traversing summits, glaciers, moraines, and rock faces. My approach to artmaking mimics this direct, physical and exploratory interaction with site using frottage and indexical processes. Printmaking, sculpture and photography record and elongate ephemeral interactions with sites both grand and public; intimate and personal. My drawings serve as personal studio explorations where I draft tactile impressions of places in flux.
Much like the surface of a collagraph plate, the urban and rural landscape are full of textures and marks. These marks become etched signatures, marking the identity of a place to record evidence of contact, growth, resiliency and change. In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino writes, “The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, [...] every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”