Portfolio
Artist Statement
I have lived for over half my life in Seattle's Duwamish Valley, an industrial corridor along one of the most polluted waterways in the United States. This shapes my practice which moves between studio work in textiles, technology, and social projects that create shared creative experiences with my community. Both investigate what it means to make art from a compromised landscape, asking how creative practice might transform material conditions rather than simply represent them.
My current research centers on Dye Pharm, a project exploring plant-based pigments grown and foraged in the Duwamish Valley. For the Poison for Arrows project, I am growing and foraging bio-accumulators, plants that draw heavy metals from contaminated soil into their tissues, and extract pigments to create patterned fabric and paper laced with the residue of industrialization. The work aims to participate in a small act of remediation: pulling toxins from the ground, transforming them into color, and dispersing them to places unburdened by industrialization. This inverts the usual flow, where contaminated soil moves to landfills near vulnerable communities. The displacement is both actual and symbolic as the plants absorb toxins and the gesture reimagines where polluted matter might go.
This attention to transformation also drives my social practice. Since 2006, I have run the Georgetown Super 8 Film Festival, where participants learn to shoot on analog film, receive subsidized materials, and screen their work locally. In a neighborhood with few gathering spaces, the festival builds temporary architecture for people to see and be seen. Like the dye work, it uses a technology often dismissed as obsolete to create connection and shift what feels possible in a place.
Across these projects, I am interested in how art reconstitutes relationships—between people and land, between neighbors, between damaged systems and the communities that inherit them. Making together becomes a way of addressing inequity not through critique alone, but through practices that enact different ways of being with a place.
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Poison for Arrows - Part 1
2026, Picture: 20"x 24" x 3"
Birch Dyed Silk with Poke Berry and Hopi Sunflower Pigment Print, Birch Dyed Wool Backing, Found Frame, Axe From Neighbor's Garage Sale
Bio-Accumulator pants were collected and/or grown in the Duwamish Valley to make the dye and pigments used in this work. This area has high lead, arsenic, and cadmium content in the soil.
Poison for Arrows - Part 1
2026, Wallpaper: 44"x 132"
Nettle Watercolor Wash with Hopi Sunflower Pigment Silkscreen
The circular symbol in this work is commonly seen on the ground around my community. It is the the cover design of the many wells in the area where ground water is sampled to test for, and remediate, pollution.
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Scheele’s Green
2025, 7’x 12’
Cotton, Plant Dye from the Duwamish Valley (nettle, rosemary, marigold, horsetail, Oregon grape, & sunflower), Duwamish River Water, life vests,
In an attempt to recreate Scheele’s Green, a historical pigment create from arsenic, I drew buckets of Duwamish River water, which has a high arsenic content, at low tide to simmer locally foraged plants for dye.
Duwamish Bend Housing Projects
2024, 6’ x 11’ x 5’
Silk, Invasive Plant Dyes foraged in the Duwamish Valley, wax, polyester thread, paracord
The pattern is a map of the former Duwamish Bend Housing Projects that was built to affordably house Boeing workers during World War II. This protest piece calls into question the current Seattle housing and houseless crisis. All of the silk for this piece was hand dyed with invasive plants, hand cut, and the front piece is contained by a hand sewed net.
Birch House
January 2025, 7’ x 9’
Cotton, Silk Gauze, Birch Bark Dye (different mordants on alternating stripes),
Birch bark was harvested from a tree in the artists yard that had to be chopped down due to an invasive Birch Borer Beetle infestation.
Birch Axe
January 2025. 7’ x 8’
Silk Gauze, Birch Bark Dye, Birch Bark, Axes & Hatchets
waterplant: Nettle Paint Tin
Photo Credit: Timothy Aguero
2024, 4” x 7” x .5”
Tin case, oven bake clay, natural watercolor pigments from plants foraged in the Duwamish Greenbelt (nettle).
A series of individual paint tins for each plant and color were created by 3-d printing plant names in several languages and stamping them into oven bake clay along with the impression of the actual plant.
waterplant: Painting Session at the Georgetown Steam Plant Science Fair
2024, 6”x11”
Natural paint pallet made from oven bake clay and plants foraged in the Duwamish Valley, 5” x 11” paintable sticker
An attendee at the Georgetown STEAM Plant Science Fair paints a plant sticker with natural paint.
waterplant: Coloring Book Intro Page
2024, 11” x 17” excerpt from ten-page 8.5” x 11” coloring book
Working with 4Culture and King County Waste Water, I created a coloring book to be used with the water color paints we created from plants grown and foraged in the area. This book educated people about the project and the waste water treatment process and its similarity to pigment making.
waterplant: Dye Garden At the Georgetown Steam Plant
2024, Photo Credit: timothy Aguero
Through the waterplant project, I created two dye gardens with participants from local youth programs. The traditional dye garden at the Georgetown Steam Plant and the native plant dye garden at Gateway Park North. Both were used to create pigments for the project.
Georgetown Super 8 Film Festival: Walking Tour
2019, Video Monitor, Raspberry Pi, Selection of Super 8 Films from the season
Due to COVID, the 2019 GS8 festival was held online. In order to reach a broader audience and activate our hard-hit restaurant row, I created a walking tour in which people oculd safely walk along Airport Way outside and view many of the community films that had been created that year.
Film with a Record of It's Own Making - GS82025
For the 2025 Georgetown Super 8 FIlm Festival, I made the opening film which included a land acknowledgement. It depicts a friend and myself collecting the seaweed in the Duwamish River that was used to eco-process the super 8 film. Underwater audio was captured using a home made hysrophone.