“After the Woods” is a tale of separation, misunderstanding, reunion, and fated evolution. It revolves around Polygone and Versus, two lovers who are torn apart upon conceiving a child and transported to an alternate reality and universe. Through time, Polygone is transfigured from Renaissance princess into a spaceship, representing advancements in technological intelligence. Versus in his knight’s armor transforms into an oak tree, indicating his ability to attract and affect the natural order, including speeding evolutionary growth in plant life to absurd proportions.  The forest they inhabit, including its creatures, develop bizarre adaptations informed by folklore, scientific speculation, and myth. In this fantastical reality and encoded labyrinth, Nature gains access to human archives. The ultimate fate of Polygone and Versus is to dissolve and transcend as one environment, giving birth to Polyverse. All of my artwork orbits the core of this story, although it is not produced or exhibited as a chronological narrative.

They stand by an eroded stack of rocks, which formed an impenetrable wall.  A streak of mineral deposits veined towards dust and grounded material at its base.  As if the ages had wept from fissures to return in a restful soil.  Standing there, it is hard to know if she waited for them, or if they waited for her to emerge.  Millions of years she had bound an elbow, a bone, nail, flesh, and hair into liquid rock, and they waited the bleeding.  Did she summon them to watch, to extract, to suck the subterranean gems of light, wanting only to return to light of sun, and burn?  Plants from rocks devour rock, give birth to mobile creatures, then shaped rock and made the world.  Why ascend to the sky and not bury deep in her womb?  At rock bottom, the monument imago emerges—a strange strata strategy.