Embodying Place: Charting the Badlands

I draw to recall the sensations of moving and resting within the landscape, images of place as translated through body, material and mark. In Charting the Badlands , gesture-driven mixed-media drawings fuse a lived, sensory experience of the natural geological environments of the American Southwest with the act of inventional mapping. While walking within the canyons, badlands and arroyos of the high desert, I gather clay, silt and soils to process into pigments in the studio. These pigments combine with my body’s gestured marks to map a memory of moving through place, a fragment of lived geological time. Drawing actions may echo geological processes of deposition, sedimentation and erosion. While not literal representations of place, the drawings reference geomorphological processes and evoke the surface of the earth as seen at altitude, with the viewer moving within and over the terrain. By physically walking the land, gathering soil and drawing with handcrafted pigments, I bridge the raw elements of the landscape with a gestural cartographic sense. This act of drawing is one of remembering the sensations unique to the experience of the flesh body within the lithic landscape, translating sense into a marked language of geological form. By using the soils gathered from the terrain as a self-referential drawing medium, the drawings invite a movement in both temporal and physical scale, a consideration of the history and context of the land embedded within the image, as well as the ground upon which one physically stands.