Mother Earth 2023

I started this piece when the news of hundreds of Native Indigenous children's bodies were found beside the residential schools in Canada. Schools that looked to  erase their culture and ultimately them.  The grief of this kind of loss is unfathomable.  It continues in a magnitude we are only just beginning to uncover. I cannot imagine the weight of this waterfall of loss down long lineages of families. Humans can be so destructive to each other, to the earth.  These stories should not get lost, buried and dismissed.  in the uncovering may there be some sort of justice and love brought and wrapped around these beautiful extinguished lights. 

Their songs and stories can be held and told. In hopes we can learn something of ourselves and the beauty of the lights put out too soon.  So their families can hold their bones again in love and honor.  They held so much hope and promise and light we will never know. 

My images often just come to me from somewhere else and evolve as I go.  Almost like a song being whispered in my ear. I can only explain it as that.  The stories come to me and want to be sung. 

I see this as Mother Earth holding babies in a net of love.  Folding their lights back into the earth, a place of both beauty and terror.  Life and death.  The sun and the stars. Water, fire and earth.  That they are being held now in love together.  Their lights are not extinguished yet, but folding and unfolding back into life.  Woven into the nets of stories.  They want to be held and found.  They have much to teach us still.  Their songs are asking us to be sung.  Their hearts are asking us to look at our own.