I love the taste of metal. Most people don't' spend sufficient time handling raw materials before they are polished, punished, coated, coerced, plaited, planished, and sealed to experience the individual tastes, smells, and secrets of a material other than possibly their food, but I have.
 
Copper is my favorite metal. It has a mineral-like taste with notes of spinach, new moan hay, and latakia that initially stains my fingers' chartreuse, which as I work ages to the color of the second pressing of olive oil. Copper is supple like silk, with a velvety surface so delicate it preserves the history of my fingers progress as they move across it. 
 
I store my hoard of copper slittings and scrap outdoors. Like vegetation, it swells in the summer and shrinks in the winter. Like a tree, it develops a crusty green bark that progressively thickens and protects for decades.  Like other non-natives, it can unfurl tendrils of spectacularly beautiful, tenacious green material that once mixed with bittersweet, English ivy, poison ivy, and multiflora rose is impossible to remove.  
 
I love watching copper interact with nature, like a ground cover, copper shelters a mouse who repays the good deed with the gift of water, salt, and electrolytes to mark the friendly metallic surface. Copper slittings and wire, without my intervention, magically unfurl, twisting with wind and time to become ground cover, nest, and den material.
 
It was the year of the "great American total solar eclipse" that I disentangled my first rat's nest of copper slittings from a cradle of bittersweet and ivy, dragged it up to the bedroom, and dropped it on the bed. I was sick with the flu. Ordered to stay I bed, what to do? I was bored. Relaxing isn't in my nature. What do you do with 150 pounds of variegated, variable width, point-O-one-six thick metallic spaghetti? Crumbled, twisted, flayed like the skin of a grapevine; interdigitated so completely no single piece longer than thirty-six inches could be extracted. 
 
I considered myself a craftsperson capable of exploring new materials, techniques, approaches. I preferred working with a few simple hand tools. I'd never made a basket, but why not. Pliers, tinsnips, band-aides, and I was ready. I completed my first basket three hours later. The rudimentary, plaited container sat proudly, its copper body pre-patinated by the elements, various mammals, and birds; on the foot of the bed. The warp and weft's misshapen fibers had been flattened with pliers not suited to the job leaving a spider web of scratches and folds that I found appealing. It was a market basket that appeared to have been plucked from the back porch of a long-forgotten farmstead. It was a beginning.

The decline of our native woodlands is thought to had been caused by invasive chemicals or direct persecution. Recent research has revealed that while chemicals and topsoil removal are harmful in actuality, our remaining woodlands are rapidly declining due to soil-based processes. 
 Clear cutting the forest protects fertile soil; overgrazing of the remaining native vegetation by out-of-control populations of hoofed ruminants while water storage shifts from within the ground to surface reservoirs has profoundly impacted below-ground decomposer communities. This action has led to fewer ground-dwelling invertebrate prey and reduced numbers of insectivores. This hypothesis is congruent with previous findings, explaining ground-foraging insectivores' susceptibility to changing land-use, the sensitivity of native woodlands to the stress of drought, and the decreased resilience of our remaining woods due to lower ground litter and greater sensitivity to eutrophication.  
 
IOW: Walking catfish, kudzu, oriental bittersweet, and DDT, while destructive, are not the sole cause of our declining native woodlands. McMansions, deer, and draining of groundwater negatively affect the soils fungi and bacteria lead to the eventual decline in the population of anything above ground, from worms and insects to turtles and larger animals. Additionally, we are killing our insect populations, including the honeybees, in part because we insist on raking up every single leaf that falls each autumn and draining chemical and sewage waste from our land into our water. The chemical waste causes explosive growth of some water plants, killing terrestrial and aquatic life due to a lack of oxygen.
 
What does this have to do with a plaited copper baskets? 
Nothing?  Well, almost nothing.
 
The woodland surrounding my home has served as the inspiration for a body of work I have been actively pursuing since the late 1980s. 
The colors of the oxygen-deprived water adjacent to the remnant of a near-by stream is a patchwork of magnificent cerulean blues and chromate greens. Dead trees moistened by the summer's morning rain stand starkly black against the leafless background of the cobalt blue sky. Sienna, umber, and grey stumps remain, roots firmly planted, their age defining rings a time point of Delaunay marks and lines. The golden swirl of Dutchman's pipe set against the afflicted, azo-yellow foliage of a black walnut sapling grabs my attention.
 
These scenes filled with the imperfections of disease, decay and disregard for the environment provide a robustly compelling visual essay, not one good for the planet's health but strangely beautiful none the less. These images have guided my work for decades. 
 

1. My wife just left to pick up trash on Beaver Dam Road. She's meeting her friend Molly who is studying to become a Master Naturalist. "It's disgusting that people throw their trash on the road rather than in cans or at the dump." ( The county waste dump is a 5-minute drive from where they will be collecting trash today.)

2. Peering from the leaves of a cinnamon fern, a green treefrog comfortably surveys its domain. Many ferns create a reservoir, a tiny pond at the base of their leaves, beneath an otherwise dry forest canopy.
 
3. In a bid to foil predators, the eastern box turtle can withdraw surrounded by its hard shell, making it difficult for a predator to attack. The ploy generally foils all predators but one—humans. Loss of habitat, collisions with cars, and illegal trade are the three most common causes of the diminishing box turtle population. 
 
A woodlands beauty is the result of its many naturally occurring and diverse, interlocking habitats. Forest floor, understory, canopy, and emergent layers along with a wide variety of animals and insects fit together perfectly like a 100,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, each piece's necessity and place determined by the soil, light, water.  
Scores of vertebrates and invertebrates watch the puzzle as they adapt and grow, always trying to create beauty while absorbing our trash and environmental abuse.  Sometimes we help but often, like the turtle, we pull inside our shells and hope for the best.  

Context-sensitivity refers to the proposition that there exists a disparity between understanding a concept in isolation and understanding the same idea or object when used in context.
Ex. A vast difference exists between a golden bamboo rhizome's beauty when employed as the model for a sculpture and that of planting that same rhizome in your garden. Golden bamboo rhizomes are beautiful to look at but invasive and highly destructive in the  environment

I was introduced to bulbs 40 years ago when I ordered a few from a catalog as a new woodland gardener. Anxiously awaiting the latest additions to my garden, when the box arrived, my initial reaction wasn't, "I can't wait to see a river of daffodils next spring."  Instead, my first reaction was, these bulbs are beautiful sculptural forms. The architecturally abstract corms, bulbs, tubers, and rhizomes provided an immediate jump-start to my sculptural basket making, which up to that point hadn't strayed too far from traditional basketry forms. 

Brief background:
Bulbs, corms, tubers, and rhizomes all fall under the scientific umbrella of geophytes.
True bulbs are layered like an onion.
Corms are solid, appearing in nature as a swollen, underground plant stem. 
Tubers, a potato is a tuber, are solid with multiple budding points commonly referred to as eyes. If you plant an individual bud (eye), you can grow a new plant. This ability to divide a tuber when creating new plants is not shared with either corms or bulbs.
Rhizomes are modified, swollen stems that extend horizontally from the parent plant. Rhizomes look roots but aren't. Like a tuber, a rhizome can be divided to create new plants. Any small piece of a rhizome can, in most instances, grow into a new plant. 

The layered construction and the curvaceous outlines of bulbs, corms, and tubers are ideal for the slow, progressive layering utilized with the plaiting and twinging of traditional basketry techniques.  Additionally, geophytes' colors harmonize with the soft, naturally developed patinas inherent in traditional patina techniques. 
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"Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth." Henry David Thoreau

It is a gift to enjoy an object within the confines of a museum. There you can concentrate solely on the qualities of the work without distraction. If I move that same object out of doors, thoughtful placement is essential. The artwork takes on an added role; in addition to its inherent properties, the work becomes a gateway to increase the viewers' awareness of the relationship between themselves and the natural world. 
 When installed in the landscape, art should possess an essential kinship with the environment; like a beautiful tree, the art object reiterates the viewer's connection to the natural world. 

National, state, and local parks preserve the nation's historic and cultural resources, natural landscape, native habitats, and remaining wildlife. I first experienced the Park system in my teens. I was always photographing where I was, drawing sketches and collecting bits of debris from trail sides, tidal pools, and roadways.  I've maintained those visual memories cataloged in large, purple boxes, each marked with a bit of blue painter's tape. Abandoned bird, wasp, and hornet nests plucked from the ground and brush, preserving each from decay. Jagged bits of pale white, orange, and purple shells pocketed on beach walks; brown, torn, and perforated leaves of every variety, size, and shape; small bits of dead tree bark, birch white, and walnut brown; mammoth, gourd sized pinecones from the west coast and delicate, cylindrical cones from Maine; brick red and grey-speckled stones of all shapes; umber hued bits of oddly shaped oxidized metal; geometrically shaped ocean glass in shades buff-green, dusty blue and translucent white; disregarded, often fingerless work gloves; the crumpled skeletons of armless, lens-less eyewear; countless sketches on stained cardboard, scrap paper, and plywood and photographs; hundreds and hundreds of photos.  Each artifact is a memory. Each memory an image; each image holds the potential for new work. 

Our health and, at times, our sanity depends on being able to get outdoors. The use of parklands trails and open spaces has doubled since the Covid pandemic began, as has the thoughtlessly inappropriate disposal of trash, animal waste, and general disregard for the landscape of our parklands. Our parklands change as we use them. We have to find a way to coexist.
 

"Land use patterns" describes the earth's designed utilization as determined by the topographic features, geologic features, population density, economics, climate, availability of water, mature growth forests, and required need.
 
There are 7 generally recognized land-use patterns; residential, institutional, industrial, road-green belt, roadside, park, and forest. To those, I would add 7 more; sustainable-waterways, industrial-waterways, industrial-devastation, industrial-farming, sustainable-farming, reclaimed-residential, and scenic-roadways.
 
The study of land use patterns allows the appropriate application of resources, assists cities in planning future growth, and farmers to plan crop rotation. Environmentalists employ them to study the health of woodlands and water, research the utilization of new technology and apply sustainable practices. 
Land patterns also describe our reaction to the designs we notice when in a plane, flying over the patchwork quilt of the earth below, which many employ to inspire us.