These works are a creative response to visual, experiential, and technical research focused on Hells Canyon, which is located in the US states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. Initially, the project focused on creative forms of mapping, while developing a broader knowledge of place. As the works evolved, my understanding and experience became more nuanced, and poetic and aesthetic possibilities formed artistically. 

Naturgemalde is untranslatable German term that can mean a ‘painting of nature’ but it also implies a sense of unity or wholeness. The term is associated with Prussian naturalist and pioneering environmentalist, Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt was less interested in isolated facts, but instead in connecting them, and believed that one’s own emotions and subjective views were necessary, to completely experience nature. Inspired by Humboldt, I am compelled by deep time, and the relative incomprehensibility we have, of truly understanding geologic change. I am also interested in the richness of an ecologically world view, focused on the importance of interdependency and how everything is interconnected.

The included images are combination of aerial (drone) photographs including “straight” and stylized 360-degree images, in addition to images of unique photographic sculptures created from 360-degree aerial VR images. The free-standing photo objects merge aerial landscape and topographic spaces imaged in the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area. The project also includes images of fossilized sea life that were found in Hells Canyon. The fossils are approximately 200 million years old and part of the collection housed in the University of Montana’s Geosciences department.