For ten years I have been working with an idea of impressing the "made" environment-freeway networks, river systems, urban grids, agricultural landscapes--on the human body in my paintings. I wanted the work to manifest the oneness of body and environment suggested in Western science by the term "organism field" and in Eastern philosophy by the concept of "interbeing."
But, in the work I was creating the sense of oneness remained incomplete and elusive. There was finally, I felt, still a separation between the body and the environment.
In an attempt to overcome this separation, I began taking photographs of the made environment to use as guides to paint from, by projecting several overlapping images at once onto human anatomy or manikins. The first images astonished me. I could see that the photographs themselves could provide clarity and eliminate separation.
The work reveals that how we use the land is how we use ourselves--that the transformation of environment is the same thing as transformation of body. There is no separation.