To whom it may concern,

I would like to cordially welcome you to my site. This place is an experimental area for me, as an artist and as an academic. It is obviously incomplete and imperfect in just about every way, but what isn't in this vast and endlessly complicated world? So here is to learning and improving! Huzzah!

I am interested in themes of perception, mediation, memory, and blurred binaries, especially those between man and nature, and between the sexes. When I say mediation, I mean the lenses through which we observe and interpret our experiences as living beings. Memory, gender, and ideas of man and nature are all examples of such lenses. I find it interesting how every individual's perception is distinct, and there may be no way to ever truly know what it is like to be someone other than oneself. Art is one of the very few ways that we can make a serious attempt at knowing one another. These frames of view and methods of understanding are not only marginally interesting, but vitally important, both socially and politically. When I say that I am interested in themes of man and nature, I am very aware of the fraught history that has come together to synthesize our contemporary ideas of what is "man" and what is "nature". The very fact that we expect "man" to mean "all humans" when it, in many ways does and has not, is just scratching along the surface.

The boundaries of these social constructs, where they break down and fall apart, are especially interesting to me. I'm sure that in part my perspective on these things is informed by my nonbinary identity, which is something that I have been cognizant of since childhood. I don't mean to say that I am thinking and working strictly along themes of gender and gender identity, because I really am not. I only mean to say that my gender certainly shapes my perspective, and as someone who doesn't fall into the conventional gender binary, I am afforded a jumping off point that is already critical of discrete categorization.

My interest in these themes, as well as a lifelong personal connection to what we in our society call "Nature" has led me to become extremely interested in the ways in which we, as humans, relate to our environment, from the largest to the smallest scale. We are all participating, in our own ways, to the collective cultural production of nature as we know it, through imagination, memory, storytelling, image-making, art practice, law, GIS, zoning boards, wetland offsets, housing developments, zoos, documentaries, nature preserves, wildlife management areas, cloning projects, invasive species removal projects, hayrides, safaris, taxidermied museum specimens, advocacy groups, encon police, pressed flowers, pollinator gardens, and elementary school composting programs.

Nature is, in the western construction, the things that aren't us. Everything but us. But we know we are animals too.