Buried Time 2026

Site One | Western Sierra of California:
“Minding Time”

2023-2026

Buried Time began with a simple act. I buried raw canvas in the forest floor near my studio in the Western Sierra and left it there for a year. Time became a medium, alongside soil, minerals, moisture, roots, insects and weather, and it transformed the surface. I found lines, pathways and forms that felt strangely familiar. In my absence, the forest had painted a forest.

As a painter, I have spent years seeking connections through line, repetition and movement. With Buried Time, I hand that search over to the land for a season. I determine how the canvas enters the ground, then relinquish control for as long as it stays buried, allowing the landscape and time to act on it. When it returns, I observe what has emerged, deciding what to preserve, how to orient the work, and when, or whether, to intervene. My role moves between intention and surrender, making and recognizing.

At its center, Buried Time is a search for connection across time, memory and physical space. The buried canvas occupies an in-between place, accumulating an experience beyond my observation and returning with traces of where it has been. Past and present, the visible and unseen, the remembered and the felt can exist on the same surface.

Buried Time is expanding across California. What began as a single burial near my studio in the Western Sierra is growing into a multi-site project, each one testing what a different landscape does to raw canvas over a year in the ground. Read more about the sites and the project scope here.

Site Two | Red Dot Ranch, Pescadero California:
“Rooted Time”
October 24, 2026

Red Dot Ranch was chosen as Site Two because the land itself is already engaged in a process of regeneration. Through active stewardship, areas of the property are being intentionally disturbed and restored to support the health of the larger ecosystem. Rather than introduce a new disturbance for Buried Time, the canvases will enter the ground in an area already connected to that work.

Four large, raw canvases will be prepared using materials from the ranch, including earth, biochar and plant matter, before being folded, twisted and buried for at least one full year. One will also carry marks made by people gathered at the site, placing a human record of that moment into the ground alongside my own.

From there, authorship shifts.

As with each Buried Time site, I establish the conditions and then relinquish control of the outcome. Soil, water, roots, organisms, weather, growth and decay become collaborators, altering the canvases in ways I cannot anticipate or direct. The year underground becomes both process and record: a specific passage of time made physical.

Rooted Time begins with intentional marks made at a particular moment and place, then gives those marks over to a living landscape. What ultimately returns from the ground will be determined by the collaboration that happens there.

Follow more of the journey here.
(click images to enlarge)