In a brackish creek in the tidal estuary of Alabama’s Perdido Bay, the water is slow moving and black, and reflections of cypress, palmetto, pine and oak form intricate designs along the water’s edge. Ospreys call, cicadas whirr, and the wind undulates the images in the water. Visually, I find myself in a primeval coastal marshland, but my other senses complete the picture: overhead, a plane approaches, and voices are heard from nearby houses. The human world is just beyond the trees.

Though my primary studio is in Memphis, TN, I spend a part of every season on the southern Gulf Coast. My work is rooted in this place, in images of in-between spaces in the diminishing and fragmented wildernesses of southern wetlands. I navigate this fractured environment with my camera, later distilling imagery into intricate line drawings which are transferred onto a substrate of sewn-together fragments of repurposed ordinary paper bags. Layers of gouache are laid over the terrain of the paper, conveying atmosphere and a recollection of the story of these spaces. This process of making and unmaking multiplies in materiality and image, mirroring the natural and geological processes that inform my work.

As an artist working in this unsettling era of climactic disruption, I create to offer a kind of song about these places, an elegy for natural systems that are daily being consumed for human use. My paintings echo wild spaces as ever-shifting repositories for impermanence, disintegration and the inevitability of change.