My creative development lay dormant for many years. I was an
outdoor woman; a hiker, a climber, a firefighter, and a park ranger.
While working on an advanced degree in plant ecology and taxonomy,
the aesthetics of what I was seeing took over the science. I was
enthralled by the beauty of the flowers and dumbfounded that the
scientists around me seemingly did not respond to that beauty. When I
was faced with a very altered life and a bone marrow transplant, the
one thing I knew I must do was to create a body of work which presented
this paradigm shift as I experienced it. As Bill Viola's father said,
"I can't really explain Bill's work other than to say that you have to
experience it. Whatever it means to you is what it means." Much in the
same way I ask the viewers to look at these photographs and experience
that altered perception. Scientifically these images are photographs
of the reproductive organs of native California flowers, but just as
surely they are the sensual, fecund, often erotic pictures of a world
we usually can't see. The flowers are photographed using a dissecting
microscope and sometimes a long-wave ultraviolet light. This is research,
this is science; and yet, it is the abstraction of an idea, a seduction,
a bee's view of a most intimate courtship. The flower's sexual parts are
here presented as a metaphor for the living cycle of universal order.
My attempt in these photographs as woman and artist, botanist and
mathematician, is to participate in this act of creation and to share with
the viewer my vision of this intimate world.
|
|
