My predominately text based recent work uses a variety of ephemeral materials and methods to explore the tenuousness of meaning and communication. Often site specific and drawing from the history or day to day occurrences of the location, I adopt a variety of voices and sources for each text: factual, poetic or mundane. The audience can be integral to the completion of each work, their footsteps transforming each installation. An initially legible text is altered into a set of purely visual marks and any message is lost. The subject, source and site of each reflects this transience of message. Many last just hours.

One ongoing series of text drawings, placed in front of transitional urban spaces, is derived from observations of common and fleeting moments. Made of ash and placed directly in the path of pedestrian traffic, each disappears quickly, echoing the nature of the moments documented and the sites used.

Another project, Field and Stream, describes long disappeared forest and water features using color coded chalk. Placed in the approximate location of the now urbanized sites, the texts function as historical markers, albeit ones doomed to disappear as completely as the features described.

During a recent residency on Governors Island, I fire-branded texts into clusters of tree stumps near Ft Jay. Another installation, in a former munitions warehouse, used seaweed wrapped letter forms that shift form with temperature and humidity changes. Both series used texts in a variety of voices that address the island’s transition from a military base to a cultural, recreational and educational space.