And that is the story of my art— everything I used to push away, the parts I thought were too broken or too messy? When I share them with you, we can see them in a different way. We can hold multiple truths, witness them with love, strengthen our connections.

Each of these collections combined my own history, my own interests, and my own idiosyncrasies at the heart of the work. The heart and the soul and the guts of the work are what make the Work work. I had to know what I liked in order to include it in my artwork. The excavating meaning — the Spiritual Archaeology, the inner work — starts with that kernel self-knowledge. It starts with showing up, with a desire to know and be known, even — especially — in the face of the unknown, blank canvas.

It is no wonder that my visual art style relies so heavily on making associations among multiple influences. When I talk about my process — Spiritual Archaeology, for the new folks around here — I refer to this as synchronicity. If you’ve heard me get excited about it, you may have heard me talk about “pings.”

So what does it look like to be a process-driven artist? Well, in my case, it looks a little like chaos, a lot like ADHD, and a medium amount of me listening to the same songs over and over while I look at half-finished paintings. And sometimes it looks like me sitting at a computer in a grain inspection building and suddenly grabbing my pen to excitedly scribble down the perfect idea.

One of the biggest processes for me, as a person with acquired disability and chronic illness, has been unlearning my internalized ableism. It's important to acknowledge that so much advice, so many online courses, and basically every Instagram challenge, is not made for me. I’m not a bad artist; the influencer life is simply incompatible with my needs as both a caregiver and a care-receiver. This means that setting expectations and adjusting my goals looks very different from literally everyone else.

“Wellness” and “adjustment” to the present state of the world — be it war, genocide, the housing crisis, climate catastrophe — seems like madness to me. Award shows and Super Bowls and March Madness brackets feel like madness to me.

My upper level religion professor in university ended every class meeting by saying “Stay sane out there.” My friend Peter and I (who met in university) used to exchange this farewell. We don’t anymore. I have reached the point where I only trust the mad, whose madness comes from a deep well of love and grief for the burning world.

In 2022 I meditated on the state of this with a series of watercolor paintings I called “how do you hold a memory?” A series of 80+ paintings of stones, rocks, and pebbles taking different arrangements, in different colors. You see, stones have longevity. Think of Stonehenge. or even mountains. They tell a story of time that stretches out before we were here, and long after we leave the planet. The cairns of Ireland, and the handbuilt stone altars of the Hebrew scriptures also influenced this series: humans use stones to mark significance and to create a tangible anchor for an otherwise ethereal memory.

When I paint, my heart returns to my backyard garden in Idaho, to all those layers, the careful hand digging with a garden fork. The layers are important. The slow remediation of the soil was hard work. Painting feels easier than that, but not on the days when I’m stuck. In the end, it’s the same intentional process of working through a season, season after season, and seeing what fruits emerge from the soil.

The first poem I had published outside of university featured wild sunflowers. They symbolize hope and resilience. I guess it’s time to lean in and start painting them.

I guess if I had to show you the roots of Spiritual Archaeology, this would be my illustration: the fleeting moment of seeing these deer among the several young trees, one old tree, and these old iron wheels. All these layers of what this parcel of land has been, is, and could continue to be; layers of time stacked on top of each other into one image.

I used to write a lot of poetry, especially about dirt, farming, drought, missing home, and living in the desert of Idaho. When I wax poetic on soil, on the secrets of the land, on the air and the water, I do so knowing there were people here before us. Land ownership is weird, arbitrary, and violent. I also love where I live. It’s the tension of holding multiple truths. My family can be doing their best to be good stewards and soil conservators, and also be awash in the privilege of being land owners in a state that exists because of the violence Homestead Act. It’s a contradiction. I can’t explain it away, or fix it; I try my best not to white wash it.

I use a lot of vintage paper and other found materials for collage material in my artwork. This is a resource post where I’ll update periodically my favorite places to source my preferred kinds of materials.

Dictionary and book pages help infuse the work with meaning. And art is a meaning-making process— the creation, consumption, curation, collection of art requires meaning to be created and negotiated.

We spent a lot of time just looking at fabric. I still don’t know how there was so much! It was like an archaeological dig—the deeper we dug, the older the pieces, the more interesting the stories. In one drawer, we found several outfits my mom had cut out to make for me when I was a toddler.

All these layers? They are me. It’s the ogre and the artist. the 90s farm kid who collected troll dolls and the grown-up queer who gets lost deconstructing Shakespeare. I’m excavating my layers and putting them on the canvas. If something doesn’t look quite right, or something doesn’t feel true? If I have doubts about what it is that I’ve managed to dig up? I just add more paint.

My mom and I are so different. I like to see, to have open doors, open bookshelves. I like to be seen exactly as I am. My mom is more curated. The second guest room exists as a themed room. That’s its function. The door stays closed and sometimes she goes and sees how nice it looks, but if I put too many finished paintings in there, I have to move them because it ruins the vibe. not that anyone sees it, it’s just the idea of the vibe being ruined.

So now, when I don’t sort my laundry as much as I did before, I think of my grandma. And when I’m making things in the studio too complicated, I think “how can I make this simpler?” Because something doesn’t have to be hard or complex to be worth doing.

Here for your edification is the next installment of Things We Found While Cleaning:

Here for your edification is the first installment of Things We Found While Cleaning: