"We are suspenders of disbelief, easily enchanted by possibility, addicted to wonder. So whatever measure of faith we harbor in the fallibility of gravity may, like our faith in so many things, be sustained not by facts or lack of facts as much as by the sheer strength of our longing for it to be so."

- Jon Mooallem,
A Curious Attraction: On the quest for antigravity



One of my primary interests in almost all of the work that I do is in exploring how the very large and the very small relate to and reflect one another. I approach my artwork from a life-long interest in science. I am not a scientist, I am an artist, but I have had the privilege of observing fields within the sciences through writing and image-making. I have been a medical photographer, a technical editor in engineering, and a radiologic technologist in X-ray and magnetic resonance imaging.

The Distant Fires suite is a work in progress that keeps growing new legs. This work is about cosmology, star ignition and death, and new landscapes and vistas made visible in unexpected ways. But it's also about a lot of other things I hadn't intended. It's about obsolescence in methods, materials and approach. It's made with outdated photo paper that isn't manufactured anymore, processed with chemistry that's getting harder and harder to get for a computer-free wet-line darkroom and uses drafting materials that no one needs because nobody drafts by hand anymore. So much of astronomy and cosmology are about studying minute traces of light, elements, particles, and debris left over from ancient explosions in an effort to understand where all of this began. By the time starlight actually reaches the Earth, the star it came from could well be dead. So the light recorded in some of the images is, I guess, obsolete light.

Whatever mechanism there is for functional mathematics is utterly broken in me. Because I don't speak math, I'll never truly I understand the sciences. So to say that the Distant Fires work is about cosmology and obsolescence is only partially correct. The work is also about an inchoate longing, despair, and the futile attempt to reconstruct disconnected fragments of understanding into some sort of articulate whole.