Rocky Mountain National Park Art Residency

This piece feels like a culmination of years of work on my creative practice as well as my career in the natural resources. My very first natural resources job was as a forest restoration monitoring tech with the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute. In that role, I fell in love with botany and spent three summers identifying plants across Colorado to help inform forest restoration practices to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. Part of that monitoring work involved going into burn areas of varying severity to look at what sorts of plants were coming back.

Spending time in the East Troublesome Burn Scar last summer during my art residency stirred up a lot of those memories, and in a world with increasing extreme fire behavior, I think that I have to choose to look ahead, rather than dwelling on what was lost. This rang especially true as my residency coincided with several fires on the Front Range outside of Lyons and Longmont that caused many evacuations, the closure of highways 34 and 36, and submerged the park in a week of dense smoke and falling ash before cooler weather prevailed. So in making this piece, I focused on the regrowth, on the wildflowers yearning for the sun, the knee height Aspen and lodgepole that were finally getting their chance to sprout. The progression of nature is not a straight line, but a circle, and in the face of disturbance she always finds a way to begin again.

 

The art of thread painting is very close to my heart. I feel that it truly allows me to reflect on the subject I am seeking to commemorate. It gives me the time and space to try to make sense of the landscape altering events we are seeing as a result of climate change. To sit with a single scene and bring it to life over 350 hours is a pretty unique experience. To me, my favorite challenge of creating compelling landscape art is finding a way to connect the viewer to a place they haven't been or may never get to. My goal with my thread paintings is to create a scene so diverse and detailed that one can find something new each time they come back to it. In that small way, I feel I am striving to capture that indescribable feeling of vastness I get when viewing a captivating landscape in person. Every time I finish one of these long term pieces my brain is already full of ideas for the next one by the end. I can't wait to see where my stitching takes me next!