Star Series

I live in the foothills of the Bridger Mountains, where my experience of the night sky reveals the intimate terrain between cosmos and psyche. The Star Series explores the relationship between our own bodies and the body of the universe itself. I am curious about the role stars have played in our own biological origins. Encaustic’s translucent yet dense materiality references flesh, yet also forms particles that suggest cosmic dust and the constant flux of all matter. As David Darling states in his book Life Everywhere: The Maverick Science of Astrobiology:

In a sense, we’re all extraterrestrial. The particles in our bodies were once scattered across many light years, and we’re literally made of stardust. Every atom heavier than hydrogen of which we’re composed was forged in the deep interior of a star now long dead. That is perhaps the most awe-inspiring truth that science has ever revealed, as wonderful as anything ever dreamed up in fiction.

Astrophysicist Carl Sagan believed that our best hope of preserving the fabric of life of which we are an integral part is to take the revelations of science to heart, to actually see ourselves as “starstuff pondering the stars.” Through integration of data visualization, diagrams and texts from a range of sources, these images layer an understanding of our biological origin in the stars with traces of our earliest, sacred mythologies in order to generate 21st century images that encompass our new level of awareness.