As artists continue the long and storied lineage of Landscape, are there aesthetic responsibilities that come with representing the forces that afford you the capacity to do so? As we delineate spaces into places, endless interconnectivity into knowable “systems”, and living matter into thing based taxonomies, who do these delineations serve and with what intentions do we proceed? My studio art practice explores what it means to give form to our Former—the Former being that from which we came, the here and now, our explicit ecological reality, the stuff of what we call nature. In this way, the Former consists of all the powers at play that unthinkingly formed the vital life-forces that afford us our perceptive and creative capacities, and in doing so, precede us chronologically. The primary questions my creative practice posits are therefore: what does it mean to give form to our Former through creative applications? In doing so, is it appropriate to assume that we are returning the favor
