After the Fall (2018)

February 2018
Pioneer Book
Provo, UT

“Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.”
- William Blake

God created the heavens, and the earth, too. A long time ago. But in this case what is past is present—the Creation is still creating, the Fall is still falling, and the Atonement is still atoning.We live in a present that is After the Fall. In a balanced world of Light and Dark, agony and ecstasy, destruction and creation, beauty and ashes. I believe in a raw, unimaginable holiness forged in the cracks of the world. In the great and terrible beauty that comes at the convergence of the sacred and profane. Much of my work centers on depicting this balance, this savage holiness. My birds are my angels, not so much dead as fallen—and no less beautiful for it. My flowers and skulls could not exist one without the other, both in the cycles of life and in the contrast between then—And as all things are in rhythm, I have placed my work in circles—in wholeness, in holiness, in halos.The moon is a coin in the heaven —tossed, spinning, and waiting to fall. But for now, it spins.