I seek stories that come from old growth America, to travel as Gary Snyder says in his poem “The Way West, Underground”, from Oregon all the way back to the caves of Europe “eating berries all the way”.

Stories and songs are vagrant. They travel like burrs on the pant legs of nomads. As stories journey along lines of speech in vastly different image worlds they retain the same bones but wear different flesh. This work draws inspiration through a constellation of story points: the medieval epic of Perceval and Gawain consorting with Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony. In both stories it requires a realignment of myth and ritual to heal the wound of the land. Robert Bringhurst’s translations of two Haida epics by the mythtellers Ghandl and Skaay meet The Odyssey by way of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Shards of vernacular folk songs, disparate epics and stories from the edge of the forest will move through the studio.

This is archaeology and spirit conjuring.