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In 2007, while walking down the street on a rainy fall day noticing sidewalks covered with leaves, it occurred to me that the damp, resilient surface of a recently fallen leaf might hold the image of a small, circular copper plate I had recently finished etching. This idea led me to my first experiments printing on recently fallen leaves collected from the streets and parks of Brooklyn. Since then, my work has evolved to include the collection and use of leaves, seeds, branches -- really, any materials that fall from trees in any season -- to create prints on paper, prints directly on leaves, two and three-dimensional work, and site-specific installations.
I am interested in how the use of leaves and seeds to make prints on paper removes the plants from their usual context and imbues them with a permanence that does not exist in the natural world. Using multiple plates and colors, along with carefully executed arrangements, I endeavor to create intricate, multi-layered images and patterns that transcend the singular identity of the individual leaf or seed, yet somehow preserve the memory of each plant’s passage through the world.
The transformation of nature’s detritus into art fascinates me. For some pieces, such as those that include printing directly on leaves, I dry and flatten the materials in order to preserve them, but I do not treat any of the materials I collect with chemicals. Dried plants can last for hundreds of years, but they, like everything in nature, have a limited life span. Eventually, the materials I have used will decompose, but I have designed each piece so that the decomposition is an ongoing and evolving feature of the artwork, an expression of the impermanence of life as well as art.
By using a leaf, branch or seed that has fallen from a tree, I endeavor to capture a moment in the growth and life cycle of that tree and to convey its transient beauty. It is perhaps this ongoing transformation through the inexorable passage of time, this mirroring of life, that has the greatest effect on me.