The Living Invisible

The subject is the invisible — the energetic aliveness that permeates all bodies, all matter. As I work, I imagine the mycorrhizal networks transmitting messages through the soil beneath my feet, the electromagnetic radiation raining down from the sun, the quantum field in which we are all entangled beyond the edge of my own body. My work is an attempt to step back and honor the more-than-human, shape-shifting world that surrounds us. No two paintings are alike because each work is given its own voice. Faculties of deep seeing and listening are considered suspect only in cultures that have lost their way. ‘The Living Invisible’ is an attempt to restore our attention to the animate intelligence that is trying to speak to us in a language we have largely forgotten how to receive.

Kintsugi Earth, 2026
oil, cold wax, & pigment stick on repurposed canvas, 60” x 50”

Ecological philosopher David Abram writes that before alphabetic literacy, language was not separate from the living landscape — words were events in the breath, embedded in place and season and bodily experience. The land was our first text. My newest encaustic paintings attempt to restore language to its origins in the earth by embedding the words of the 13th-century Persian mystic Rumi into unrefined beeswax — a malleable, flesh-like material alchemically produced in the body of a bee. I call on Rumi not as political statement, but in honor of the civilization that gave us his irreplaceable voice — one that has the power to lift us out of human isolation into the gold of the living invisible that surrounds us.

My home and studio are built on the site of Storrs, Montana, an early Anaconda Company mining town that once held five thousand residents, a school, a post office, and a hotel. Now nothing remains but remnants in the earth. As a descendant of miners from Cornwall, England, extraction is not abstract to me. It is ancestry. My painting practice involves as much digging and excavating as it does laying down paint: encaustic, oil, cold wax, and pigment stick built upon grounds whose earlier histories remain buried yet generative beneath. The sculptural work is made from vitrified Plasma Enhanced Melter (PEM®) glass, a byproduct of plasma gasification technology that returns almost any waste to its molecular structure, converting it into inert glass at temperatures as hot as the surface of the sun. PEM® glass is not just a material choice. It is the embodiment of the work’s central proposition: that waste can become beauty, that the wound can become a gift, that art can participate in the repair of a culture bent on extraction and disposability. This is not metaphor. It is geology. It is genealogy.

The works in this exhibition move between scales — intimate surfaces that reward close looking, and large paintings that ask the body to enter. Each work is an invitation to attend to what is ordinarily beneath notice. To feel what the body knows before the mind catches up.