INTRODUCTION

My interdisciplinary practice operates at the intersection of bio-art, eco-critical art, and socially engaged practice. I employ visual, olfactory, and participatory methodologies to investigate humanity's relationship with ecological systems. Drawing upon ecopsychological theory[1], Guy Debord's analysis of how the spectacle substitutes images for authentic experience[2], and shifting baseline syndrome, my work interrogates the increasing disconnection between human consciousness and natural systems — intensified by technological acceleration and consumption ideology.


THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Engaging with Gibbard et al.'s conceptualization of the Anthropocene[3] as an ongoing transformative event rather than a formal epoch, my practice operates across deep time and immediate urgency simultaneously. I investigate the relationship between planetary stewardship and further planetary enslavement, tracing extractive ideologies from Manifest Destiny and the Columbian Exchange to contemporary overconsumption.

My research questions explore:

• How can artistic methodologies restore historical ecological memory across longer temporal scales?

• How can embodied, multi-sensory experiences bypass technological mediation and the spectacle's image-based disconnection?

• How does beauty function simultaneously as seduction and critique?

• What knowledge emerges from positioning ambivalence—simultaneous wonder and horror, complicity, and innocence—as generative rather than problematic?

• And how can I empower others to ask themselves deeper questions that might lead to positive change?

METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES

The dear future archive (2018-present) employs participatory epistolary methodology, gathering over 750 handwritten letters from global citizens documenting emotional patterns of processing ecological change. Field research across the Arctic (2019, 2024), temperate PNW forests (2015), and Brazilian coastal ecosystems (2018-present) employs observational methodologies from natural history. Everything is Fine (2020) juxtaposes fifty pounds of Arctic ghost nets with testimonial letters, materializing consumption's global reach. The Monument (2021) uses bio-materials — live orchids, preserved moss, and petrichor scent (synthetic replication of a soil bacterium’s chemical signal, geosmin) — as nature itself rather than representation. Earlier resin works (Brièvité, 2019) employed plastic to preserve ephemeral forms, creating "plastic immortality" that embodies the Anthropocene paradox. Yesterday's Rain (2018-present) investigates olfactory art's capacity to trigger embodied memory through petrichor variations, functioning as "mobile environmental memory.” It leverages scent's direct limbic connection, reconnecting viewers to sensory experiences beyond image-based mediation.

Crucial to my methodology is acknowledging my own implication within systems I critique. I do not claim moral superiority or position myself outside consumption patterns. This honest positioning generates a more nuanced understanding, producing knowledge from the contradictory experience of living in and loving a world one simultaneously helps destroy.

CONTRIBUTION TO KNOWLEDGE

My practice contributes to the current conversation around art’s role in these larger global problems (indeed, the “polycrises” as it has been described). Through various materials, processes, and projects, my practice articulates ambivalence as a legitimate epistemological stance — in other words, an ambivalent consciousness holding contradictions in productive tension. Beauty functions as disruption: aesthetic attraction that, upon encountering the embedded critique (plastic, extinction, consumption), creates cognitive dissonance that cannot be easily resolved. Working across evolutionary and historical time generates a form of temporal vertigo — destabilizing awareness within nested timescales. The letter archive documents ecological grief's affective dimensions, demonstrating that emotional connection precedes action. Paintings of ecologically significant birds stand out against the backdrop of the Baroque, both a warning of wealth but also a positive celebration of our world’s boundless expressions of beauty.    

My research asserts that aesthetic experience—properly conceived—generates forms of knowledge, emotional connection, and temporal consciousness essential for confronting the rapidity and magnitude of anthropogenic planetary transformation, even as we remain implicated in its unfolding.

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[1] Roszak, Theodore, et al. Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. Sierra Club Books, 1997.

[2] Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord. Rare Treasure Editions, 2025.

[3] Gibbard, Philip, et al.” The Anthropocene as an Event, not an Epoch.” Journal of Quaternary Science, 22 Jan. 2022, https:doi.org/10.1002/jqs.3416.