In my artwork I have often made a space for grieving what is disappearing from this earth due to climate change. Paradoxically, in the series, Swamp/Garden, I called attention to ideas of white supremacy, stubbornly undead, even though we bury them. In those underwater paintings with Confederate monuments, guns and junk, the swamp is an imaginary place where unwanted, shameful things are pushed out of view, with luxuriant flora and fauna telling the opposite story, of an ecosystem that feeds on and gives life.

 Lately I have been turning to what is here, alive, and resilient. Drawing inspiration from sites in the coastal Southeast where I grew up, the works in BOG honor places of great biodiversity, especially the unique ecosystems called Carolina Bays. These oval-shaped swamps, bogs, shallow lakes and savannas once numbered in the thousands. Today Lidar reveals their true extent: a vast pattern of oval depressions, aligned northwest to southeast, effaced by centuries of drainage.

•  Anamorphic Carolina is a diagonal installation of 150 small watercolors using plants and rust. I have inscribed these small abstractions with notes on the continuum of colonizing forces, from natural history collecting and classification to extraction, deforestation, drainage, and industrial farming of the bays.

• The paintings in Flower and Trap delight in the fire-resistant plants endemic to the bays, such as Dionaea muscipula, with the insects that pollinate and feed them.

 • With intricacy, pattern and lack of hierarchy, the large oval Sphagnum paintings honor the BOG itself. The Sphagnum bog is as acidic as weak vinegar; its anaerobic, anti-microbial depths have perfectly preserved human corpses for thousands of years. And it sequesters more carbon than trees. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her first book, Gathering Moss, "There is more living carbon in Sphagnum moss than in any other single genus on the planet."

In Swamp/Garden I painted swampy, underwater scenes with Confederate monuments, guns, junked appliances, car parts, treating the swamp as a place where unwanted or shameful things can be pushed out of view. But, swimming over and growing through these objects, the plants, trees, fish, and turtles of the paintings tell the story of an ecosystem that feeds on and gives life.

My elderly neighbor in rural Washington complained about a wetland restoration behind us. They were returning the farmland to wasteland, she said, undoing the hard work of a generation of farmers to “drain the swamp” and create arable land.

From a certain point of view, the swamp or marsh or bog is a strange and indeterminate place that you want to get rid of, make usable, or bury stuff you no longer want. From another, it is a nursery, a garden, a luxuriant habitat that buffers the effects of flooding and rising seas.

From a certain point of view, the abject history of this country, its wealth borne of genocide and forced labor, its lingering racism and inequality, is a murky underworld that we need to forget and put behind us so that we can get with our lives. From another, forgetfulness is a privilege; the muck of the past is still with us; transformation is not possible without unearthing what has been forgotten or denied.

In the imaginary world of these paintings two contradictory visions co-mingle. Trash pile and compost, wasteland and habitat, swamp and garden.

Increasingly my teaching is influencing and being influenced by my work as an artist. My Art & Ecology course addresses the possibilities for art in revealing our entanglements in the world’s larger systems of life. The course combines field work with studio projects and social practice art responding to ecological relationships. In 2017 the course coincided with an encyclopedic exhibition at the Whatcom Museum curated by Barbara Matilsky, Endangered Species: Artists on the Front Line of Biodiversity with work by 52 international artists. I participated in a concurrent exhibition at Western Gallery, “Modest Forms of Biocultural Hope,” curated by Hafthor Yngvason, with the project, Salish Wonder Room.

Salish Wonder Room was an evolving creative collaboration with my students, a kind of contemporary cabinet of curiosities, tracking students’ discovery and experimentation as they responded to scientific research, field study, indigenous practices, and contemporary art. The question we were asking in Salish Wonder Room is : what if we understood the universe not as a collection of objects, but as a communion of subjects? What if we saw other species not only as objects to be collected, preserved and studied, but as living beings who are themselves holders of knowledge?

For most of my career, my work in painting and drawing has been exploring environmental and geological change. I never expected to make a large environmental art piece, until I learned about “Surge,” an upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Northwest Art in 2015. My collaborator, the designer and artist Heidi Epstein, and I originally conceived of the environmental installation, Living with Water, as a long wall of translucent green fabric. We wanted to insert a flood-level line in the landscape -- an agricultural field or parking lot or backyard where floods of that depth are predicted– in the Skagit river delta where we live. The idea was to put an abstraction, the level of water predicted in a major flood event, into real space.

Working with the Skagit Climate Science Consortium to understand the data and consider sites, we originally produced a photo-simulation of the project along with hand-painted maps, and showed these at “Surge” in 2015. For a later iteration of “Surge” in 2018, we added a third artist-collaborator, Jasmine Valandani, and had a year to think, plan, raise funds and fabricate. Instead of a wall, or a flood-level line in the environment, “Living with Water” became a room of water that you can walk up to and enter inside of. We were still taking an abstraction, and putting it into real places, at actual size. But now you could walk into it, so the project became an immersive experience and a public interaction. With multiple sites outdoors and a final installation in the museum, the project was a beautiful and serene space in which you could imagine a reality that is difficult and even terrible. The photographer Charles Biles became a fourth collaborator, documenting every phase and producing a slideshow for the museum exhibition that connected it to the outdoor installations.

With the theme of coral life and death, Boneyard is composed of six paintings that together form the image of bleached coral as a massive white sepulchral form. Bloom is an ongoing series of paintings and drawings that layer abstraction and description to evoke the fertility and growth of coral reef systems.

A group of 21 small watercolors mounted on panels, Water Fragment appears mismatched, as if the relationship of its parts were provisional. Beneath the grid-like structure, transparent watercolor brings depth and fluidity. The subject of Island of Ought and Naught is a tiny island off the coast of Iceland where the last great auk was captured and killed. Elizabeth Kolbert compares the island, in The Sixth Extinction, to “the base of an enormous column" with guano from seabirds that give it “what looks like a coating of vanilla frosting”. In Enez Glas, the cobbled forms of islands erode and dissolve in an expansive pictorial space of watery floodplain.  Inspired by walks on Fir Island in the Skagit river delta, the scene is one of water reclaiming land in a fragile, shifting environment.

Finished in the aftermath of a major calving of Jakobshavn glacier in western Greenland, Divided Earth presents the ice shelf of a marine glacier as if it were the architecture of an immense skyline, crowding the picture plane. The whole work is 18 paintings in three groupings of six. Pattern, repetition and stability are undermined by cracks, slippage, and sections that appear to be teetering on the verge of collapse.

Landscapes are repeatedly formed and deformed through time. We live on a brittle crust of earth that is continually moving and changing – most of the time very slowly – because the brittle surface is moving in and out of a more ductile, flexible layer where rocks bend instead of break.

In Cracked Prospects, figures of the picturesque -- the remote landscape, the broad vista, moments of luminous transparency -- are broken and abstracted. Ice is imagined as an organization of grids, structures undermined from below or within by melt and movement. The watercolors in Subglacial present the emblematic image of a polar ice shelf as interlocking grids, rigid structures undermined by melt and movement. In Melt Marine, thick chunks of ice or land are floating into or out of the picture plane. With both the large oil paintings on canvas and small studies on panels, oil glazes are layered over screen prints of maps of a glacier.

"Glacial speed" is the epitome of slowness, the idea of imperceptible change, imperceptible movement, like geological time, a time that is too slow for short-lived humans to watch. But with ice sheets disintegrating, icebergs breaking off and flipping, the speed of glaciers melting has progressed from the imperceptible to the perceptible, from the apparently timeless into human time. Glacial Speed interprets the changing topography of a shrinking glacier as if from above. Eighty screen prints of a mapped glacier are hand-painted with watercolor washes and abstracted forms to suggest phases of change. A video with sound from glacier events connects the stills in succession.

The works in the series Extremities use watercolor, ink, and acrylic paint, combining chance procedures and different mark-making strategies to build images of melting icebergs. I was interested in the psychological metaphor of the iceberg: all that we know is just the tip of the iceberg. Hidden below the surface, the unknown is like the unconscious, the suppressed or avoided.

In Multigrid and the Grotto series, crystalline forms and patterns are layered on paper, panels and wall drawings. The study of minerals and geology opened a pathway into abstraction.