In 2017, I joined the fisherman Elsa Sebastion, and the biologist, Natalie Dawson, to document the coastal temperate rainforest of Southeast Alaska while bearing witness to destructive logging practices. The paintings grew out of the practice of groundtruthing, (the project Last Stands), and two summers of joy and heartbeak as we bushwhacked together through the clearcuts and threatened old growth that defines the Tongass National Forest. I aim to create a portrait of this place through the objects I found on the ground. Categorizing the objects by color allows me to show the human and more-than-human all together on the same page—honoring how we encountered these things in a landscape both fractured and beautiful. I wonder about the ways a landscape can express a color. How losing a species of mud shrimp to extinction also means the loss of a particular shade of blue. This organization—as well as my decision to leave the objects unnamed—presents a challenge to traditional western taxonomy.

See more in the the film Understory by Wild Confluence Media and Elsa Sebastian.

This work was supported by the community of Tenakee Springs on Chichagof Island, the writer-activist Kathleen Dean Moore as well as the supporters of the Last Stands. Thank you.  

Alexander Archipelago, Southeast Alaska, 2017-2021