The issue of the environment is a collective debt, owned by all of us who live on the globe, without borders, on all continents, a tricky inheritance that we share. The everyday stuff keeps our attention, mothers protecting their children, from traffic, from starvation, from ignorance, all of the caring, choosing and doing that we do to survive. Its instinct, a lens that interprets everything that we “see”.

What is my present? What is my future? In what way can we go forward? This is our vantage point. It is all above ground. 

     I came away from the first session of Visual Think tank, after drawing an image of my own entanglement, wanting to look at the surface of the earth from underground. If I could look up, I would see the delicate resting layers, roots reaching down and the shape of a pond, like a window, looking out to the air. In the image above, the pipe was superimposed after the drawing.

In the second piece the pipe came much earlier in the composition.  It was something that had to be considered, its rigid shape, and gaping circumference, became the focus of the roots, a given, changing my expectation and changing the delicate essence of the underground. The surface is gone.