I am drawn to natural forms because they make a world in my imagination even more gracefully than they do in my environment. Representing our natural world takes patience and desire for so many reasons: we are too near it constantly; contemplating it removes us from urgent worldly matters; it's easy to see nature as a decoration rather than as a residence where our imagination gets to play; and artists come back to it again and again looking for something new. What is left that is new?

In these images of botanicals, bodies, rifts beyond repair, I look for the natural world to turn away from me. The rootlessness inherent in isolated objects degrades and invigorates what we see. Where Jamaica Kincaid's beautiful essay "Flowers of Evil" bemoans the permanent loss of uprootedness and transplantation, my images are an attempt to give new meaning to old images, to make talismans of natural things, fetishes on paper from icons in imagination.