Ear to the Ground

…in the dark times, recycling and reweaving, remembering, and recreating becomes more valuable than simplistic beliefs in perfection, endless progress and pointless growth…sometimes facing the end is the only way to begin again.

- The World Behind the World, Michael Meade

There is an inextricable connection between the land I inhabit and the work I produce. My new work is a step back, a meditative effort to let human thought and opinion cease in order to give voice to the living earth around me. My home and studio are built on the site of Storrs, Montana, an early Anaconda Company mining town that had a store, a hotel, boarding rooms, a school, a post office and 5,000 residents only 120 years ago. As a descendant of miners from Cornwall, England, mining reflects my own ancestral history as well as the historical reality of Montana. Mining is an apt metaphor for my painting practice, which involves as much digging and excavating as it does laying down paint. My work using encaustic, oil and cold wax and the obsidian-like, vitrified glass made from trash shares an affinity with encounters in the natural world yet doesn’t adhere to the parameters of representation.

The vitrified PEM (plasma enhanced melter) glass that is new to my work is a byproduct of plasma gasification, an advanced waste management technology originally developed at MIT in the early 1990’s. When waste material enters the plasma gasification chamber and is exposed to extreme temperatures, it breaks down to its molecular elements. It turns any kind of trash, from plastic bottles to car bodies, into inert, non-toxic glass and clean fuels. This technology has the potential to liberate our oceans and our landfills from the onslaught of the waste we are producing at an ever-expanding rate. Since plastic production began in the 1950’s, humans have produced an estimated 9.1 billion tons of plastic, while it is estimated that less than one-tenth of that has ever been recycled. Plasma is at the core of fusion research, which aims to replicate the energy-producing powers of the sun. PEM glass is not just another art material, but represents a profound paradigm shift in using technology to heal our environmental dilemma by keeping waste out of landfills and greenhouse gases out of the air. My use of PEM glass is one way I am able to reclaim a healthy relationship with the earth.

My deepest concerns lie with the human and nonhuman voices that have been silenced in our technocratic, industrial era. Indigenous languages and non-rational ways of knowing have been and continue to be actively suppressed in our secular culture. Listening faculties and belief in the unseen are considered suspect, superstitious, and ignorant only in cultures that have lost their way. We need to cultivate new practices (not new ideologies) to both materially and imaginatively return agency and voice to the sentient world around us. We now know that trees communicate through vast networks underground, and that thirty-nine trillion microbial cells including bacteria, viruses and fungi call our bodies their home. We are enfolded in the much larger commons of the biosphere that is trying to get our attention. What has living in a human-centered world cost us? We must engage in a more enigmatic and unmediated conversation with the natural world around us. And keep our ear to the ground.