Preaching to the Birds

Lately, I have become interested in the combination of painting on stained glass and video. I was entertained initially by their dissimilarities—after all, the use of painting on stained glass has a long history of use in church architecture while video has a brief, home entertainment based history.

Now I feel that my impulse to work with these two media in one project also stems from the ways in which they are alike. First, they have formal similarities; that is, they have a common dependence on the light projected rather than the object made. Second, each medium arouses common expectations in the viewer: stay tuned for these important messages.

In this present body of work, I am using these two media to explore both the story of Saint Francis preaching to the birds in the twelfth century and my perceptions of our current relationship with the natural world. I watch for the passing of messages between media, between species, between a historical spiritual context and contemporary culture.

Twins

I became interested in making dogs because dogs are, of all animals, our most intimate partners in domestication. The more time I spent thinking about this partnership, the more I realized that although different species, we are twins—mentally and physically linked in our mutual pursuit of household and animal pleasures.

The idea of mythic or saintly twins is fairly common in a number of cultures. Generally, the pair represents a sanctifying union of opposites: dark and light, male and female, heaven and earth, body and soul.

In this work I wanted to make twins from what we know best.