My practice explores the fluidity of culture and time. I’m interested in how stories and symbols create meaning that’s passed from one society to another, transcending cultures and offering a connection between diverse viewpoints and across ages. To Drift is to move slowly, especially as a result of outside forces, with no control over direction. It means to be carried by a current of air or water, or sometimes circumstances. And it is, I think, an apt description of how the past decade—with its political, cultural, and environmental turmoil—has felt.

I was raised in the driftless region of the upper Mississippi River Valley. The land’s rich soil is dotted with sacred Effigy mounds—formed by now displaced Eastern Woodland Native communities into the likenesses of bears and birds and serpents. The area was settled by immigrants, of varied backgrounds, who mined and farmed and logged and built cities of brick and churches of stone. It is an area developed by populations that stayed or move on depending upon circumstances. Most distinctly, the driftless is defined by the Mississippi River whose flowing waters have brought regular cycles of destruction and renewal. Its waters link the land to the sea, the past to the present, and local to global. I left my hometown as a young adult, eager to see as much of the world as possible. After a lifetime away, I’ve returned to it and am now experiencing the river valley through the lens of both my past and its untold histories.

The Drift exhibit consists of egg tempera paintings and silverpoint drawings created since 2020. They incorporate mythologies and symbols drawn from cultures and places that I have personal connections to. The exhibit is hung to subtly reflect the structure of the churches and riverboats that help to develop the fabric of Dubuque and consequently my own perspective.