Seeing as Caring part one: Witness

My artwork is a product of intuition. I am unable to preconceive of an image and make art reliably. It has to come from a place I cannot speak to directly. It has to come in its own time. This facet of my work comes from somewhere different than the part of my brain I use for clinical science and physical therapy practice. It is the way I witness the world.

I have learned that I can pre-season this intuitive process. Repeating images, visiting sites repeatedly, and especially reading vast amounts of content related to subjects that have visually captured me tends to “sensitize” this art muscle and the output usually delights.

I use art to know and to understand. It’s a different type of knowledge and creating new knowledge through art is as valid as the scientific method, albeit the products are used in markedly different ways. I use art to help me see and to learn about the world around me. I might be looking at the molting coat of a mountain goat, the way the morning light highlights the deep colors of autumn leaves, or even the impossible landscapes left behind as byproducts of industrial processes. These are all things in the world around me that I care about.

Caring, as it turns out for me, starts with seeing.

But, what is caring? It can be much more than a sentiment. In contemporary art, philosophy, ecology, and rehabilitation science, care is emerging as a practice, ethic, skill set, and worldview.In both art and rehabilitation, we often focus on fixing pain, dysfunction, or deficits. Environmental care and care-based art reframe this relationship as maintenance and repair, not solutionism. Caring is universal. From single-cell symbiotic relations to the highest levels of human altruism, we, all of us on this planet, care.

With this lens, humans are not adjacent to nature, but are part of it, co-regulated organisms set into the ecosystem existing together. Caring is acknowledging this space. I recently had artwork centered around caring featured in a poignant exhibition entitled, “Metaphors of Recent Times.” This exhibition, jointly sponsored by the San Francisco Art Commission and the San Francisco Photo Alliance and curated by Beth D.W. was positioned as a response to a previous body of work, “Portfolio 2020,” curated by Linda Connor. Together, these bodies of work spoke to the moment of our times, politically, emotionally, societally, and environmentally.