Mental Weather (Blue)

“The principal fact is that the biosphere has existed throughout all geological periods from the most ancient indications of the Archean.” -Vladimire Vernadsky. This is a statistically incredible length of time for the conditions capable of supporting life to have remained so fundamentally constant. So what is this elan, gaia or geochemical riddle that now begins to quietly release her grasp? Between the hits of devastation, the climate crisis looms as an incomprehensibly ethereal threat, embodied in air. Timothy Morton describes it as a hyperobject, something so vast and abstract it overwhelms the mind's ability to process. Figure ground, the bones of any picture, more and more my eye goes straight to the background. Mental Weather is an ongoing series of drawings of weather, both physical and psychological, and reflect on the elusiveness of climate crisis in a material, perceptual and experiential sense. I’ve been developing this body of work since the Thomas Fire, yet another California megafire, swept through Ojai in 2017. Skyscapes are pressed, submerged, scribbled through, or cut into various configurations, gestures in search of a more tactile grasp of the atmospheric spaces. The cut drawings can be presented in multiple formats, either playing with the shadows cast by the cuts or backlit in blue lightbox frames.