This body of artwork was completed because, as an artist, I wanted to try to understand the relationship between nature and the urban landscape. Each piece was directly inspired by an object or fragment found by walking through the city.

In each leaf and each crack in a sidewalk there is chaos, order and tension. Each fragment is both a limited portion of the landscape and also an amazingly rich view of the microcosm within it. A piece of rusted metal or tree bark has in it both the reference to its past and also to a state of decay. In each piece, there is the progression of time, natural forces and often human intervention. I never choose something shiny and clean. The rust, the crack, the break all provide insight for me into the complexity of nature, and also what human endeavor seems to oppose.

The first process was to record the fragment, either by rubbing its texture onto paper or by retrieving it and taking it back to the studio. Sometimes the fragment was complete, as in a leaf: often it was removed from its context, as in the rubbing of the top of a fire hydrant, or an imprint taken from a section of Minneapolis' light rail system.

That fragment then became the point of departure for a series of works on paper, oil paintings and small sculptures. In the studio, the rubbing of a tree trunk was examined for pattern and irregularity; the roots of a smaller tree were traced on top and then the piece was completed by the imprint of a burnt log, which I then dropped from 20 feet onto the paper. A tracing of an icicle was embedded in epoxy and then painted on the surfaces. The leaf was leached from its own natural pigments, leaving a delicate stain on paper. A dried clump of grass that had grown in a sidewalk crack was combined with
colorful bits of plastic, a flat stone and a branch to become a piece of whimsical sculpture.

In its entirety, the work becomes a sort of sensory map of the city, reflecting its juxtapositions of natural and industrial, ugliness and beauty. The work exists as a temporal marker as well-mapping not just place but time. These urban fragments have been rescued, in a way, from the effects of time; their reinterpretation functions as both snapshot and artistic meditation