Feral

Artist Statement

I walk a lot in my neighborhood. Streets laid out at the end of the nineteenth century, decaying infrastructure all around. As I walk I think. More often than not I find myself studying the little wild things pushing through cracks in the sidewalks—thriving, blooming, refusing to stay contained.

On one of those walks the word FERAL lodged itself in my mind. The dictionary says it means wild, escaped from domesticity. Feral hogs, horses, cattle. I am borrowing the word to investigate the uneasy space between our species, Homo sapiens, and the rest of the living world. I use it to examine nature versus aesthetics, domesticity, religion, and other social institutions. I also use it to describe myself. On first glance I appear tame. A second glance reveals a wicked darkness and a wild, self-deprecating humor that forgives nothing.

My process is simple and lifelong: visual and verbal stimulation trigger a response. I paint, I photograph, I write—essays, fiction, altar pieces. The works appear disparate at first: palm trees recovering after wildfire, jungle fowl descended from Polynesian birds mixed with escaped domestics on Kauai, Spanish cattle turned wild on Florida ranges, bones and feathers collected from beach and swamp turned into devotional images.

Two systems quietly organize everything. Produce examines the animals and plants we have manipulated for consumption—geese, pigs, chickens, goats, sheep, and the longleaf pine and palmetto that once held this fragile land together. Liturgy studies the remnants of natural systems—shells, feathers, wild orchids in a scarred power-line ditch at Cary State Forest—enlarged so the viewer can spend time with their geometry and secret lives.

Childhood memories from rural Mississippi, kayaking the black waters of the Suwannee and the Everglades, and the controlled burns that still define Florida all feed the same current. Fire, water, sand, and sunlight are not background; they are scripture.

As we enter the Anthropocene—our new age defined by human activity—the old stories of dominion and separation feel exhausted. The ditch at Cary State Forest preaches a better sermon: a scarred borrow pit, tortured by power lines, responds with snowy orchids, sundew, and pitcher plants. Nature does not need our permission or our apology. It simply persists.

Feral is my ongoing investigation of that persistence. It refuses hierarchy. It refuses the scripts of eradication, management, and spectacle. It chooses kinder shoes and quieter eyes. It watches. It paints. It writes. It lets the wild things push through the cracks and bloom where they will.