In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Anna Tsing suggests that the reshaping of the landscape makes us forget what has come before. Ecologists call this “shifting baseline syndrome”, a theory that in fact emerges from work done in Nova Scotia by marine biologists Myers and Worm (Myers) on changing perceptions of the abundance of fish stocks. The act of forgetting makes new landscapes but remains haunted by past versions of itself. In Rusted Coat Pockets is a series of wanderings through one such ghostly site. This collection of field notes (which we could also think of as assemblages) were created in response to the walk from my home to a sunken trawler ship exposed by its ruin on a Dartmouth shore. The work collaborates with the places encountered along this walk to track stories, juxtapositions, and overlays in order to uncover what might have been lost. What emerges is the realization that an excavation of the past involves learning to listen, and landing firmly in the present.  

The possibilities of encounter in porous liminal sites of my wanderings are mirrored in the processes of expanded painting. The studio became a place of discovery; natural dyes shifted overnight in chemical reaction and assemblages were continuously reworked without any real idea of product or finished. The unpredictability of earth pigments, eco prints and natural dyes were combined with other processes that were until recently unfamiliar to me: quilting, stitching, chainlink, and knotting. Weaving together ideas and fragments into painting objects with modes of connecting I was not necessarily skilled at became another means of settling into not knowing. What does not seem to possess linearity, what seems saturated in unknowability, in fact becomes a fertile middle space. We can move forward or backward here; we can be free to make mistakes and free as well to learn anew and reinvent. The site in ruin and the studio in alchemical reaction are both spaces of transformation; bridge space to uncover magic.