Water, in its many forms and meanings, connects the images in Earth’s Eye: lakes, rivers, and underground pools; water as mirror, water as time, and water as purification.

The concept of water as mirror resonates in 19th-century American art and thought. Emerson interpreted reflections in landscapes as metaphors for democracy in that the will of the people should be reflected in the laws of the nation. Thoreau described the small pond at Walden as “Earth’s Eye” in which the depth of human nature was reflected. The reflected image also calls attention to the very act of visual perception and raises epistemological questions about the believability of what we see.

Much of my work has concerned rivers, especially the Mississippi. Stopping at the St. Louis Art Museum on my annual summer migration to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I was captivated by a painting, Marquette and Joliet on the Mississippi (1907) by Oscar Edward Berninghaus. I quote this work, which features two of the Mississippi’s earliest European explorers, in several of the pieces in Earth’s Eye.

Latin America exerts a profound cultural influence over South Texas, my home most of the year, and like many artists, I have travelled there as extensively and as frequently as possible. The pool images in the exhibition were inspired by my experiences swimming in the cenotes (underground limestone pools) of Yucatán. Sacred to the Maya, they were seen as portals to the underworld and were often receptacles for sacrificial offerings.

The Mourning Landscape of weeping willows and gravestone rubbings, and its counterpart, The Healing Pool, are created by imprinting actual plant material and stones into wet paint. The tiny, collaged images of babies, hands and arms come from The Florentine Codex, an encyclopedic document of the post-conquest Aztec world created by Sahagún (a Franciscan monk, like Marquette) and his indigenous collaborators.

As Simon Schama wrote in Landscape and Memory, “Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock.” In addition to my own bodily experiences of the landscapes I inhabit, I am interested in their cultural and metaphorical meanings of healing, purification, renewal, and sacrifice. These are pieces I feel compelled to make as my own healing offerings to the world in defiance of the environmental and civil degradation that now confronts us.