Eco-Locating: A Sense of Place Series

Eco-Locating investigates the abstraction of nature’s fundamental patterns and lines, reconfiguring them into constructed forms that evoke landscapes both bold and playful. It examines the human relationship to nature and its capacity to anchor experience, both physically and emotionally, situating my practice within a sustained exploration of place as simultaneously internal and external.

Contrasting the familiarity of daily routines with the wild, unpredictable, and immersive qualities of untamed environments, the work considers how sensory engagement with the natural world can inform visual abstraction. Through sustained time in nature, including hiking and contemplative observation, perceptual fragments are translated into a visual language of mark-making, color, geometry, line, and pattern.

Influenced by writers such as Nan Shepherd, Gretel Ehrlich, Yi-Fu Tuan, Diane Ackerman, and Mary Oliver, as well as historical landscape painters, the work explores the dynamic interplay between external landscapes and inner experience. Painterly gestures are mediated by shifts in scale, geometric forms, opticality, and repetition, articulating the tensions and resonances between natural and constructed environments.