Heaven & Earth is the synthesis of two bodies of work. The first deals with physical location, particularly with issues of rootedness. In an age where it is increasingly easy to travel, work remotely, and stay connected to long-distance friends, we are freer to choose nomadic lifestyles and perhaps feel less obligated than our parents and grandparents did to remain close to family or in the town where we grew up. Although I would not describe my current lifestyle as a

nomadic one, between traveling somewhat frequently and for months at a time over the past five years, watching much of my family scatter from our original home in Tennessee only to come together again in Richmond, driving back and forth between Harrisonburg and home, and applying to do my master’s degree in a different country, I have spent a considerable amount of

time worrying about, dreaming about, and trying to get to different locations. Drawing on texts by Wendell Berry and Hugh of St. Victor, this body of work explores the tensions between

individuality and community, transience and stagnation, obligation and freedom, travel and connection to the land.

 

This series on location concludes with a landscape. Although my other paintings have included references to specific places, the land has been confined to the background rather than being the focus of the piece. This painting of the Grand Canyon privileges the land itself. My family rafted down the Colorado River a few years ago, and we loved the canyon well because it was beautiful and different from home and temporary. We also loved it well, not because the trip was perfect, but because we knew what it was to play in the mud and make the best of it. We returned home, reminded that the earth is old and vast, ready to offer connection wherever you dig in. The canyon doesn’t answer my original question (is it better to stay or go?) but it asks a new one—will you love the place that you are?

 

The second half of this exhibition turns to the spiritual realm. As an art history student specializing in medieval Italian art, I often look at works that were designed to serve particular liturgical functions and that grapple with representing the miraculous. One question that has come up in my research is—how do artists depict divinity? In this body of work, I ask myself, as a painter, that same question, blending the visual language of medieval art with my own spiritual experiences. However, as I set out to “depict divinity” I was reminded that of course we experience the heavenly in no other place than our very physical bodies among our ordinary

places and family and friends. This is not a great revelation—our forebears in the church knew it and the artists they commissioned knew it—hence the great emphasis in medieval art on the

incarnation, Christ’s bodily torture, death, and resurrection, and the physical reminder of these things in the eucharist. For my work then, I turned to scenes from life with my family and in the church, where the repetition of concrete practices, like preparing a meal or praying aloud, are able to transcend their mundanity. In the end these two bodies of work, designed to address both heaven and earth, seem not so different from one another.