I was opened to the possibilities of installation art by two exhibitions, Mario M. Muller’s In Defense of Love and Mel Chin’s Revival Field, both of which I saw at around the same time in the early nineties. The power of each experience made me want to expand the scale of my own work, and so I began to unscroll large rolls of paper onto the studio wall horizontally, and to walk them from end to end, applying painted imagery and written text as I went along, repeating the process while also cutting the rolls down into irregular shapes. From my annual trips to Maine, rocks were the subject matter and my hiking journals provided the texts.

The physicality and methodology of those early drawings informed my first large scale installations, Site Specific at Bellarmine College (1995) and The Rumpelstiltskin Letters at Spalding University (1996).  A review in the Lexington Herald-Leader of my installation at Lexington’s Blue Grass Airport (1996) provided the umbrella title for this early body of work, as well as the exhibition title for my installation Reading the Landscape at the University of Maine at Farmington (1998).

Included in this group as well, are the later “sediments” installations, which combine multiples of oil on canvas paintings with other materials to tell stories about the landscape.

Throughout, the recycling and recombining of materials has been a constant. The materials from Site Specific were reworked as “Library” and two groups of collages; the airport drawings were torn into strips, some of which found a permanent home in the “Bog Dig” panels at the Farnsworth Art Museum. I used others for Reading the Landscape at Farmington in 1998 and again in Roadside Erratics, also at Farmington (2016).