Resonant Signs: Secret Places, Sacred Spaces
Resonant Signs: Secret Places, Sacred Spaces was made possible through support from the Indiana Arts Council and the Cristal DeHaan Foundation. In 2024, I was honored to receive the DeHaan Artist of Distinction award, which funded the construction of my first dedicated art studio in Bloomington, IN. This space has been essential to the development of the project which nears completion. My painting palettes are foraged using historical methods and materials to develop botanical palettes to preserve the recipes, processes, and practices once used by artist likes Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent Van Gogh, and other masters who used plant pigments until the mid-1800s.
The series consists of twelve paintings and twelve companion photographs highlighting the secret and sacred spaces of the wild and the lives of animals who inhabit these precious environments. Four paintings and their corresponding photographs are still in progress. These paintings are created through methods of ethical foraging and the use of natural materials. Resonant Signs: Secret Places and Sacred Spaces is an ecological attunement with the earth. The works embody divine vitality as an act of honoring slowness, care, and intimacy with the land. Deep self-reflection—spiritual, ecological, and embodied experience—emerges through direct engagement with nature rather than abstraction, control, or extraction. The spiritual dimension of the work is inseparable from its material processes. Through a sustainable, hands-on practice, I cultivate a relationship with nature that understands divinity as immanent, relational, and alive within the landscape.
The work is deeply informed by the medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen, a visionary woman whose authority emerged not through institutional structures but through lived experience, ecological observation, and spiritual insight. Hildegard’s concept of viriditas—the greening, life-giving force of the divine—articulates a theology rooted in growth, embodiment, and interdependence. For her, greenness was not symbolic ornamentation but tangible evidence of divine creativity in the world. It appeared in gardens, forests, and cultivated land—spaces historically sustained by women and marginalized labor. Hildegard understood viriditas as something to be cultivated within both body and soul, affirming the sacred intelligence of the embodied self. This project aligns with that lineage, reclaiming spiritual authority through material practice and ecological harmony.
By engaging with natural processes and mycelial systems, the project invites a renewed relationship with the natural world—one grounded in reciprocity, regeneration, and reverence.