Statement I sponsor a community garden. My drawings respond to the life that materializes in myriad forms over the course of the seasons. There are the gardeners with their plans, and there are the plants. Plants do not, of their own volition, conform to the will of the gardeners; that is not in their nature. Every year, the garden becomes by default a quarter of an acre of predictable chaos. The plants run rampant, looping into knots and tangles, turning a lot of careful preparations into one big, fat, hairy, neurotic fit. The rabbits eat the lettuces, the foxes eat the rabbits, the dogs run the foxes out of town. Birds fall dead from the sky. The air is thick with insects that eat and are eaten in vast quantities. The vegetation is beset by vegetable plagues of Biblical description. It seems that the entire universe, known and imagined, is a giant spiraling muscle, recycling a finite amount of stuff into an infinite variety of forms. While all of this is happening the gardeners discuss gardens, governments, and all of the other circumstances that impinge on the daily life of a human being. A community garden is inherently radical and subversive; it is a very hopeful place. These drawings of the vegetal world have more in common with Dutch Still Life painting than with landscape, per se. As the site changes with the season, so do the images. I carry materials into my studio and construct the drawings there. I use the archaic practice of drawing to reinforce my illusion that this world is fixed and stable, a safe, manageable, and knowable thing, which clearly it is not. Sequential events layer onto the page, condensing long periods of time into a single image. Working this way, I make images that are carefully observed and accurate, but not at all true. They are an artifice composed of references to ephemeral matter that no longer exists as it is represented. Uncertainty leaks out at the edges.
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