I created the stone pieces when I was a graduate student in the UCSC History of Consciousness Program. That grad program’s hyper-intellectuality left me feeling unsettled, ungrounded. 

Handling these heavy chunks of matter balanced that relentless over-emphasis on reading weightless theories. When I walked the beaches looking for stones and carried them upslope in my backpack to my car, I felt more grounded and more alive.  Once home, I placed them in microcrystalline casting wax with shells, dried sea plants, and other traces of biological life.

Sometimes the rocks and other objects fit together like jointed bones, or their color patterns suggest circulatory or other biological processes, or they combine to create a mandala-like 3-D image that seems to have a life of its own. These images speak to me of the interrelatedness between living bodies and what we consider to be nonliving elements of Earth.