Stump Prints
Living in rural Massachusetts for 32 years has given me a broad canvas to observe and engage with the landscape through site-specific book installations and nature prints. Working outside with paper, pencil, and ink while using found materials as the matrix has always informed my work, creating a direct relationship, a reverence, whether it is a fish, tree stump, deer leg or a crushed beer can, letting my fingers feel the story of scales, fur, or tree rings. The individual plant and animal woodcuts I make are talismans of the land created though observation, collecting, imprinting, and collaging across years of exploration.
The tree prints I create come from trees cut in Western Massachusetts honoring the complexity of nature and the labor of timbering. The chatter of the saw cut across the face of a tree stump recorded in these prints reflect on the 400 years timbering of these woods from the first English colonists cutting White Pine for the masts of ships to the present generation of forest. Each tree records a story of growth, decay and renewal.