Walking the land and shore here in Belfast nearly everyday, I think a lot about where I’m walking, who’s walked here before me and how I believe the land holds the memories of all that’s come and gone. 

We bury our dead, we construct our dwellings and centuries old ones return to the land they were built on, melting back into the landscape. Meanwhile under the ground, seismic shifts are happening, rocks are pushed up and over, the rain falls and what we have erected on top of the ground seeps back down into the ground. Pottery remnants, stories told around campfires, bird song, the bones of humans and animals combined with the rocks and the strata, the arrivals and departures, layers upon layers of stories are soaked into this land.

My personal attachment to the land here goes back through five generations of my father’s family and is linked to both the land and the sea. Sailors, long-haul traders, fishermen and stone cutters—I think about the generations who lived and died all over the Midcoast area of Maine. I think about the animals who make their homes in the trees, in the caves, in the water. And I think about how the earth below our feet constantly receives us, supports us and takes what we give, how the ocean we live beside does same.

I mean to create an abstract archeology that illustrates the endless conversation that goes on between above and below, between earth and sea. I want to articulate the sense of what has happened and what is happening, how all the things that were, are washed ever more deeply down into the layers of earth and rock and how we are endlessly adding to it, like a conversation we keep returning to, like a walk that never ends.

I mean to create what I imagine is one way of connecting to the Earth and a depiction of sanctuary as I see and feel it, as I walk these trails and beaches, swim these waters. And a note: I understand that much of what we humans have built and created on top of the Earth, that has washed back down has caused massive damage, has changed the story about Earth, but for the purposes of this project I am keeping that in mind, and also focusing on where we humans and the Earth meet in a good way, that point of gathering is where the Magic is made.