I can’t speak for why Elements Mixed Media asked me to take part in their Montana Rooted video series but I was honored to participate. As I see it, I’m just a silly human doing silly human stuff attempting to balance love, challenge, and beauty in this short and often complicated life.
It is exceptionally difficult to sum up what motivates me since it is a moving target. I’m not trying to evade the use of my own words but this quote by Arundhati Roy pervades my thoughts on the matter:
The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To Never get used to unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never forget.
I go to the mountains to seek beauty that is fierce and unrelenting yet welcoming and indifferent. And I make art to bring that aesthetic back to daily life and events. I rebuke the shallow anonymity of the objects in our lives and work to replace those objects with things that have a connection to the maker, a story and a place beyond ourselves. I do both art and mountain adventures to feel the full extent of what it means to be human, vulnerable yet strong, joy and pain, insignificant yet important, connected and distant. Or stated more simply, the paradox of being human.
The things we carry with us, scars and art, are what tell the story of experience. Sometimes that story is difficult and at other times its just pure fun. I want my story to smell like subalpine trees warming in the sun… and coffee.
