Site One | Western Sierra of California:
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 walked away for over a year. It was more experimental than intentional. Maybe more frustration than symbolic.

Then I returned, dug up the canvases, and was given a bit of a gift. I found paintings. Lines and pathways that felt familiar. Skies, lakes, brush and bramble, beetle marks and roots, reflections and leaves, creatures. In my absence the forest had painted a forest.

Time unexpectedly became a medium, alongside soil, minerals, moisture, roots, insects and weather. They had beautifully transcended the raw surface.

There is intervention: I determine how the canvas enters the ground, twisted, rolled, wrapped with foliage, dirt, branches, found objects, and 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 again intervene with form and line. 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 for a moment, accumulating an experience beyond my observation and returning with traces of where it has been. Past and present, the visible and unseen, the remembered.

Now, through creative partnerships, what began as a solitary burial near my studio in the Western Sierra is growing into a multi-site project, each one testing what different place and time does to raw canvas over a year in the ground.

Read more about the sites and the project scope here.