Mula Bandha
Lavender. lemon thyme, wild raspberry
sweet basil, radish
ravishing arugula
my friends all
 
I am but a delicate flower
timeless
immortal
destined to live and die
and live again
​
The soft fragrant folds of my petals explode
in watermelon, tangerine, strawberry
lemon-lime and plum
Not to mention the velvety green
of my long stem and leaves
​
I'm a big girl I am,
a queen here in the garden
stronger than I look and smarter too.
​
I'll outlast you.
Perennial conqueror of new territories,
my children, immigrants, hybrid strains
defy the boundaries set forth by those who seek to control nature
my nature
​
I return each spring in regal attire
camouflaged in beauty
but beware
Like tangled morning glories that strangle and support
as they reach towards the sun
I am rooted and ruthless
​
My lineage is long
my wisdom that of the ages
I was here in the beginning
witness to she who tasted the apple
and learned of the secrets of the Universe.
 

For me, beauty has to do with character. In this series, I wondered what might happen if I allowed my girls to get older, wiser, louder, more daring.  What would happen if I allowed myself to more thoroughly embrace painting and turn it too, metaphorically, into an empowerment. Where is the boundary between the beautiful and the horrific, the ripe and the rotten, between naivete and wisdom?  In these I recognize that I am Eve and I am getting older. Like Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, I have dissected and reassembled these hot house hybrids from the genetic shards of abstract painting and straight photography and its digital progeny.  Are they monstrous desecrations of the photograph and bastardizations of painting or are they a new genetic strain, stronger, faster, smarter?  

These images are connected to the work in my new book –  Break Boundary: Places Real and Imagined – by the color I capture from the real world and the color I create in my studio. It is perhaps not immediately clear, however, that the connection between these two bodies of work also hinges on the idea of the Break Boundary, the place of transformation where one thing turns into something else. I am interested in that moment where to borrow from Lawrence Weschler’s book on Robert Irwin, we forget, for a moment, the name of what we see.

 Artist Statement for The Earth is Intimate/2017 

Recurring themes of Alice, Eve, the garden, the snake, an original tongue, the birth of knowledge. The garden is pungent, tactile, connected to the first smell of mother, the first smell of baby, the smell of my mate. We are what we eat. The smell of the garden informs speech, speaks to me of the earth. Visceral light, color, sound, smell; an extension of my home, the garden reminds me that I am of the earth and also that I will return to it, to the dirt. I will decompose and be reconstituted. I will become part of the ground upon which future generations are built. 

I am connected to the earth; its smell is savory, sweet. I dig my fingers into the soil. Worms seek cover, mysteriously disappearing into the underworld. And if, like Alice, I were to follow the rabbit, its white bushy tail disappearing down the hole, if I were to follow and fall into the earth what would be revealed to me on the underside? The garden speaks to me of the possibility of another world, a parallel universe where things are not what they seem. 

My cabbage reveals labyrinthine corridors of mesh and flesh. I slip through cerebral portals, past dendrites chasing the rabbit deeper and deeper. A cat appears, calm, tail twitching, enigmatic, unhelpful. I am unable to ask for directions. My language has unraveled. Like a child, I must learn the alphabet of this strange place. A chorus of cicadas accompanies the wind. The flowers, big girls all, reach for the sky, their heads nod in the breeze. Colorful parasols, their beauty is fragile, delicate. Their perfume draws me near. They drink light and reflect its vibrant color. Big girls have secrets. They share with me their experience of time. And the roots too tell me things, whisper stories, sing operas and dance. I scale the mulch pile and my foot slips. I fall into a watermelon rind and slide to the bottom. There is no death here in this place-all is reclaimed by the earth, all is recycled. Trust in me says the snake as she slithers by. My visit to the underside forever changes the way I see things.

'Break boundary' is a term I discovered reading Marshal McLuhan?s book, The Medium is the Message. He defines it as the transformative point at which a system is irrevocably changed. I think about the water in relation to this term. By slow degrees, we are changing the ecological balance, the chemical composition of our oceans. Oil spills are just one small part of the problem. Global warming too is changing the weather and the way that water flows. I also think about this term in relation to photography, specifically, the language of photography in relation to the language of painting.

New technologies that allow for the manipulation of the image have changed forever the way we understand the photograph as a document of 'truth'. Certain celebrated photographic images of our time (I am thinking specifically of the photographs of Jeff Wall, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Andreas Gursky) are not those that capture a single moment but rather those that are composed of many moments to suggest a single moment. They make us aware of the medium itself and they are interesting because they play with our understanding of the structure and language of the medium. They are composed much more like paintings and they make us aware that time has become, to a greater extent, a tool of the photographer rather than a fixed variable.

In a similar way, abstract painting also made us aware of the structure and the language of the medium of painting. I have always been drawn to the work of Mark Rothko. His paintings suggest windows through which to enter another dimension. His resonating squares of color suggest a boundary between here and there, inside and outside. These photographs, on the one hand, very simply reflect my love for the water but they also reflect the influence that painting has had on my understanding of photography. They play with the boundary between earth and sky and the boundary between photography and painting to suggest my belief that the language used to define and understand these two mediums has evolved, and that the emergence of a new language is upon us.