Other Times

The earth is unfathomably old.  It contains remnants of billions of years, compressed through pressure and heat over time into thin layers of geologic matter.  Vertically oriented geologic diagrams stack these histories as distinct layers receding down towards the center of the earth; depth equates to age through the law of superposition.  Organic bodies trapped in this process occasionally undergo taphonomic alchemy, transforming from biologic to geologic through fossilization. Handling a fossil provides tactile recognition of mortality and fragility, a geologic memento mori; these subterranean remnants warn of entire ecologies dissolved through extinction.  In popular culture, depictions of ancient creatures are often alien and anachronistic; panoramas of jutting volcanoes erupt their boiling red smoke into pink skies, where toothy therapods stalk and slash innocent lumbering sauropods.  Fantastic ancient natural worlds of darkness and undomesticated chaos buried millions of years below, a world without humans, according to humans. 

This work explores the subterranean, the interior, the hidden spaces of time found in nature.  It encourages a scale shift and de-orientation, displacing anthropocentrism and linear time as primary perspectives.  Images of geologic strata, fossils, cicadas, and tree rings reference re-emergence, where strange, old, buried ecologies protrude into the familiar.  Each image is embedded with a superposition of data reflecting shifting climates, dendrochronology, cicada calls, murder ballads, and the Ocarina of Time, stacking contemporary personal narrative with alternate chronologies and scales of experience.  The horror of increasingly disrupted ecological systems emerges as data and imagery referencing extinctions, ancient and current.

Deep Cuts

36” x 48”

Graphite, paper, photography gels

This piece began as a drawing of rock forms found in Cañon City, Colorado, along the Tunnel Drive trail over the summer of 2025. The initial drawings became the four outer corners of this piece, with the internal drawings being constructed through an exquisite corpse related technique. The red film gels both emerging from and protruding into the work, building ephemeral geographies depending on the light source from above, hinting at the subtle, weird horror of climate change, extinction, and other information embedded in the rock. The positioning of each red point is based on the intersection of images mapped separately and plotted onto the larger drawing; the images included a drawing of a plesiosaur by Mary Anning, text from a page of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the linear paths of Tornadoes tearing through Oklahoma over the past fifty years, and the rings of a tree from my backyard. This piece evokes nested information, geologic and quantum superpositions, and evolving topographies.

Hang Down Your Head and Cry

65”x45”

Paper, graphite, hair, wood, and magnets

The strips of paper in follow the rhythm of the past 20 major extinctions over the last 400 million years. The length of the piece reflects the artist’s height. The phrase “HANG DOWN YOUR HEAD AND CRY” is woven with the artist’s post-partem hair, referencing the murder ballad, Tom Dooley. This piece functions as a vanitas for an era of extinction, tenontosaurus skull in this piece operates as a memento mori, scaled to the proportion of geologic timeframes. “HANG YOUR HEAD DOWN AND CRY”, lyrics from the popular murder ballad Tom Dooley, serves as a subtle admonition towards those who inflict this violence.

Trace Fossils / Ghosts

120”x24”

Marker, Pencil, Trace paper, Player piano roll,

Over years 2024-2026, I worked with the Vertebrate Paleontology collection at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History to create this on-going exploration of drawing as record. This piece maps the experience of touching fossils, tracing their topography with human hands, coding these ancient taphonomic forms into a distant, temporal experience. The primary drawing portion is presented as an overlay to the player piano roll for “Tom Dooley”. The semi-transparent paper allows the abstract musical notation and lyrics to interact with the tactile fossil map, bringing together disparate narratives of extinctions and re-emergence.

Terrible Lizards, Land Before Time

40”x60”

Graphite on paper, wooden supports, Viewmaster films

Layers of an old stump from my Oklahoma backyard are extended out, with tactile drawings of fossils spread throughout the drawing, and parasitic wasps mining the layers. This drawing is sliced into strips, resembling core samples taken from trees. Small, barely visible Viewmaster film pieces from vintage reels are embedded into each strip, with imagery depicting dinosaurs and ancient creatures. These strips are manipulated and organized along a linear, mirrored line, reflecting the increasing global temperature shifts of the past 40 years - coming to a central point and reflected back into a descending pattern. This work continues exploration of the information embedded in natural spaces, challenging anthropocentric narratives with absurd, historically inaccurate images of dinos. The organization of the strips as mirrored crescendo and decrescendo breaks linearity, suggesting alternate futures.

Song of Time

65”x20”

Paper, Graphite, Wood

This piece is comprised of two drawings spliced together, one of the night sky as it appeared in my Oklahoma backyard in July 2024 and the other of a photo my mother sent with a ruler measuring a decaying stump from a tree I grew with in my childhood backyard in Georgia.

The height of the strips of wood supporting the drawings reflects the pitches of the song of the thirteen year cicada, Magicicada tredecim, alternated with the relative increases in surface temperatures of the Southeastern United States over the last 200 years.

Visitors were asked to write a date that was important to them and place them into the holes, embedding their own experience into the piece.

The pattern of the holes reflects the musical notation for the Song of Time, as played in the videogame Zelda: Ocarina of Time