I believe that Wisconsin is a very special place, evident by its beautiful landscape. Living in rural Wisconsin gives me many opportunities to experience spiritual and mystical forces that I find in this beautiful natural world. I am interested in how these experiences manifest themselves in me with a connection to the earth, land and sky. Through my work I hope to express to the viewer these experiences.

Important to the land and the Wisconsin landscape are gardens. Gardens are still important to so many people, including myself. There seems to be many deep archetypal connections to the garden that we are not aware of consciously and do not fully understand and comprehend. I believe the “Garden” to be how we physically and spiritually connect to the earth. It is our psychic umbilical cord to our planet.

The sense of rhythm in my work is to express the cycles that are an integral part of nature and so common to life itself, the rhythm of birth, life, fruition, death, decay and rebirth, matter being transformed from one form to another. The darkness is to communicate that there is so much more to life than what we see with our eyes, it suggests us to travel from the conscious to the unconscious worlds. We need to engage all our senses, even senses that we may not be aware of at this time to see beyond the physical world.

By working and reworking the surfaces of my plates and drawings I can achieve a rich mysterious surface. I etch layers onto the plates which are scraped in some places and left in other places. These layers refer to the rich layers of compost and mulch. Matter being transformed from one form to another. Images that imply there is much more then one can see. The essence of images that were once there is now only a feeling, a mark left to prove their existence.

I, like Emerson, realize that there is much more to nature than one often sees. In “Nature” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: “Standing on the bare ground my head bathed by the blight air, and uplifted into infinite space - All mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing, I see all, the current of the Universal being circulated through me. I am part or parcel of God.”

CathyJean Clark