In my artwork I have often made a space for grieving what is disappearing from this earth due to climate change. Paradoxically, in the series, Swamp/Garden, I called attention to ideas of white supremacy, stubbornly undead, even though we bury them. In those underwater paintings with Confederate monuments, guns and junk, the swamp is an imaginary place where unwanted, shameful things are pushed out of view, with luxuriant flora and fauna telling the opposite story, of an ecosystem that feeds on and gives life.


I am interested these days in a different project, that of inspiring care for what is here, alive, and resilient. Drawing inspiration from sites in the coastal Southeast where I grew up, the  work in "BOG" honors places of great biodiversity, especially the unique ecosystems called Carolina Bays. These oval-shaped bogs, shallow lakes and savannas once numbered in the thousands. Today Lidar reveals their true extent: a vast pattern of oval depressions, aligned northwest to southeast, effaced by centuries of drainage.


•  "Anamorphic Carolina" is a diagonal installation of 150 small watercolors using plants and rust, inscribed with quotes that convey both a sense of wonder and the settler drive for "improvement" and profit that destroyed these coastal ecosystems.


• The paintings in "Flower and Trap" delight in the fire-resistant plants endemic to the bays, such as Dionaea muscipula, with the insects that pollinate and feed them.


• With intricacy, pattern and lack of hierarchy, the large oval "Sphagnum" paintings and elongated "Peat Dream" watercolors honor the BOG itself -- whose acid, watery depths, compressing time immemorial, provide the most efficient carbon sink on earth.


In a time of climate change and extinctions, one thing that we can do is to identify places that we personally and communally hold sacred, where life is flourishing. We can wrap these places in a spell of wonder, do everything we can to protect them, and visit them in our dreams.