Finding Buoyancy 2026
From the window of my studio on the Columbia River, I watch the ever-changing movement of water, vessels, birds, and buoys. These floating markers —small, bright points within the vastness of the river—have become a recurring presence in my work and a metaphor for finding balance amid constant change.
Over the past five years, buoyancy has become more than a metaphor for me; it has become a way of moving through life. Beginning with the loss of my father in 2021, followed by my move from Portland to Astoria and into a studio hovering over the river, my life entered a period of profound transition. In the past year, I lost both my mother and my sister. Yet these years have also brought extraordinary joy. I found love, became engaged, and now stand on the threshold of marriage and my 60th birthday. Grief and love, endings and beginnings, have existed alongside one another. Finding Buoyancy grew from these experiences and from the question of how we remain open to life when the currents beneath us continually change
Finding Buoyancy explores the tension between weight and weightlessness, depth and surface, movement and stillness. Through encaustic painting and wax collagraph printmaking, I build layered surfaces that echo the shifting currents of water, geological formations, atmospheric patterns, and the passage of time. The process itself is an act of discovery. Wax can be carved, brushed, embedded, scraped, printed, and transformed. Layers accumulate and obscure, then reveal traces of what came before. I am interested in this interplay between control and chance—how a surface can hold both evidence of human gesture and the unpredictable forces of nature.
Throughout the work, runes, astronomical symbols, fixed stars, and recurring symbols of buoyancy offer another form of navigation. They become markers of strength, awakening, faith, transformation, and direction—points of orientation within continually shifting terrain.
For me, finding buoyancy means staying present and open to change while seeking balance within the currents that carry us. These works are not maps toward a fixed destination, but records of navigating uncertainty—carrying the weight and beauty of what came before while remaining open to love, transformation, and beginning again.
