Heart Land Statement
In the aftermath of recent surgery, the current condition of my heart -- and more generally
the rhythms at the core of my life -- are the subjects of these prints and paintings, which mix
images and concerns of the distant past with those of the present. The “heart land” here is a
place where physical problems penetrate down to the aquifers of early experience, pumping
up memories of visits to my grandparents’ homes in southwestern Iowa. I am intrigued by the
differences in emotional and geographical scale that cling to such memories like views of a life
seen at differing magnifications. The past is recalled as if from a great height.
Early this summer I traveled with my son to visit the small town where my parents both
grew up and are now buried in a hillside cemetery. Two paintings in this show are based on
satellite pictures of that area, specifically the land where my grandfather’s farm was located at
the time my mother was born, and a crossroads on the route that she and I drove with my
father’s ashes. “Chevy on Rte 48, With Irrigation Plumes” remembers a day in the 1960’s when
my grandfather took us out to look at the fields in his new car.
Other works focused more tightly on faces and individual figures are reveries about
freedom and confinement, anxiety, danger and change. The figure in “Corn Goddess with
EKG” wears one of my recent electrocardiograms showing symptoms of atrial fibrillation,
blazoned across her chest like a lace bodice.
At the close of a statement for the 2011 Creative Workforce Fellowship I wrote, “If my work
has a central theme, it is probably the mystery of human identity, exchanged between persons
or clutched close to the bone. This coming year I would like to remember who I am.”
In these paintings I explore the idea that I am who I remember.