gallery: New Works

In 2025, I created two new sculptural installations, which were debuted at the Bowen Arts Tour. Both have a deep connection to my sense of place and belonging.

Atl'ka7tsem Promise

Atl'ka7tsem Promise, also affectionately called the garbage kelp, is a giant bull kelp made of garbage. It can float in water or lie on the beach. 

 

elegy

The bones of this place are the driftwood that has always decorated the shores of my home. My father was a forester, so it was never lost on me that these bleached limbs and bodies on the beaches were once trees, cut or fallen often far inland and then floated here down the rivers to the salt water where I live and play. These bones are rounded and worn, carrying not only their own living history in their cells, but now also the beautiful scars of their journey through the sea. In life, they were habitat for countless species of birds, mammals, insects, plants, lichen and fungi. In death they are habitat again—now mainly for ocean invertebrates and seaweeds. For contemplation.

In leaving this life, we continue to love and nurture it. I lost my mother in 2024—the woman who raised me to love this place for all its beauty and all its stories; the woman whose voice and presence taught me all there is to know about love. And in leaving she taught me that love continues. Small white fragments of my mother’s bones still lie around the roses in her garden, where we scattered her ashes, in the autumn. Her bone fragments carry the marks of her life’s journey and of their own journey after she died. They probably hold invisible scars from the chemotherapy that did not save her. And they’re feeding the roses, and shining up at me, reminding me every day that she’s still here, creating beauty; loving the world; reminding me to do the same.

The poem on this sculpture is in thirteen parts, as there are thirteen moon-cycles in a year. And it’s meant to be read in any order, because we can never predict the ways our paths may wander, or what beauty will come of the ways they intersect.

The place we call home—the whole earth—is under threat from our greed and blindness. I am choosing to see. I want to see all the beauty, both in life and in death; to pick up the bones of humanity and let them guide us; nurture us away from greed and into a better future. A future where we choose to see.

I would like to thank my partner, Markus Roemer, for his substantial help in realizing this project.