I feel unmoored, like the ground is falling or a breeze could pick me up. Life moves too fast. I am overwhelmed – jumpy. The present moment, the feeling of one’s body, and its relationship to the world are surprisingly ambiguous and pliable. Our experiences and attention shape the way we see and how we feel. Meditation teaches me that in this world of unknowns, change and impermanence are our only certainties. If I could come to terms with this, would my fear subside?

I communicate the dilemma of being through landscape. Trepidation colors the scene as I bring my insides to bear on the outside. Thick atmosphere tints the scene like an eclipse or summer storm. Shining suns unfurl, conifers become bulbous, and orbs cast glows on crinkly weeds. The landscape is expressive, abstracted, and embodied; rather than imagining a picture of trees or a rising sun and replicating it, I build the forms by feeling the shape of them in my body, inch by inch, through an imagined three-dimensional space. The paintings describe what it feels like to be active in a space rather than the details of a picture of the space. Tiring of the rectangle, I soften the paintings’ corners to change my relationship to the picture plane and mirror the visual field’s undefined edge. This anchors one’s experience of the body (feelings of inside) to the world (feelings of outside). Translucent screens hover over the landscape altering its hue to show one’s complicity in the ways the world appears through the filters one brings to it. Reality is more than it seems in these phantasmagorias, and the viewer is implicated in its magic. As though standing on oceanic ground, one’s attention follows the receding landscape out only to wash back up at the shores of one’s skin; hope; longing; loss. While building other worlds the sense of my impermanence in an expansive, mysterious universe opens into a broader context and I am free.