BODYEN SERIES
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.