I’d
like to be a rabbit. Just for a day or two, to see what the world looks
like as a rabbit. Or maybe a squirrel. How would the world look to me
at ground level? How would I perceive a flower or a field or a tree?
The tiny things would seem huge in my squirrel eyes. And the huge
things... would they be nearly unfathomable in their vastness?
I like to explore the tiny things that have a big impact. Nature is filled with tiny: tiny creatures digging in the dirt, tiny moments in time that can change your life, a tiny gesture that stays in your heart forever. Nature is always right in front of us—telling us secrets, asking us questions, and giving us answers. Nature tells us a story, but science gives us the ability to tell it.
Our nature moves us to hold certain memories close to us; science gives us the mechanism to sort through a lifetime of events in the blink of an eye. Squirrel or girl, the science of memory is the same: the whole history of ourselves caught up in a tangle of wires and synapses.
What sparks us to remember some things so vividly? How do we sort through all the moments that add up to a life, choosing which to discard and which to hold dear? How does memory shape things over time, softening, revising, refining?
My work examines both the moment a memory is born, and those long hours spent remembering. While science provides us the mechanism to remember, nature often gives us the desire to forget. It is this constant pull that I examine by bringing images to life with needle and thread. The titles in this series—all taken from articles in Science magazine—offer further proof that we can’t escape our nature because we can’t escape the science that inextricably binds us to the natural world.