Edgelands

We moved early last summer during the pandemic to the edge of Virginia and West Virginia. It is a beautiful place. Our house is situated in the limestone valley east of the Great North Mountain, which forms a boundary line between these two Virginias. One of the things I like best about running and hiking here are the uninterrupted sightlines, and well, the edges of things. The edge between path and meadow, forest and field, horizon line and sky, garden shed and garden beds, industrial geometries and the organic natural topographies in which they are set, the incredibly diverse and verdant botanic abundance that crowds in between the fence and the gravelly asphalt edge of road verges. So when Donald and Kelsey offered me the chance to exhibit here at the Grasshopper Gallery, in Lost River Trading Post, I knew that was the theme that I would like to explore for this show. 

Anne Carson writes in her essay, “Dirt and Desire”, that “In myth, woman’s boundaries are  pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses” (133). “Love is the principal motivation in [Greek] stories for women’s flight from form or tampering with boundaries” (134).  Paint too is a mutable thing. I primarily use water based paints, some of which I have created from transformed organic material, minerals, and found objects. I paint with a fluid in order to create hard edges and forms, motivated by the love I have for both the landscape and the materials themselves. This seems delightfully apt for these paintings about edges.