My artmaking is sometimes akin to magical thinking. I pray through the doing of my work that the earth will ultimately heal, that its insects, animals, ecology and living beings of every type will experience peace, and all will become able to move forward to a future of interconnected health and sustainability.

I was part of an eleven-person exhibition about these concepts when the world shut down due to COVID. We had installed an amazing exhibition that, sadly, never opened. My Prayer for the Earth series came out of this.

My Prayer for the Earth images began by scanning my own hand-marbled papers, then creating symmetrical structures in large formats on the computer, leaving out areas to draw into directly. Reducing the starts to light grayscale images, I had one each printed professionally on archival Hannamuhle paper. Over long periods of time I hand- colored the patterns I pulled out and drew additional ifreehand magery into each using colored pencils. The symbolic knot/snake and its background of #1, for example, is entirely drawn by hand,

What would have been the fourth drawing I decided to complete as an accordion-fold book instead.