My current body of work serves as a personal reflection of the mountainous coal regions of Northeastern Pennsylvania where I grew up and the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of extractive industry. My patrilineal ancestors immigrated and settled in this part of Pennsylvania from Eastern Europe, primarily Lithuania and Poland. They were miners of anthracite coal in Pennsylvania until the mines closed in the early 20th century. Several generations later, my family still resides there, amongst the steep mountains and black coal waste piles, rivers tainted orange with acid mine drainage, gilded churches, and dilapidated mining structures. The inhabitants and the landscape never truly recovered from this industrial past, and I find this to be compelling grounds for my research and visual art. The impact of enduring heavy extractive industry is still very much felt in these regions, in the communities that live there, and within my own family. As part of a multi-generational mining family, they grew up in poverty in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and saw the end of underground mining as well as many other industrial jobs in that region. Through intaglio printmaking processes and book arts, I work to recover histories and memories of my ancestors, connect through an antiquated process involving the removal another mined material, copper, and invest hours of physically demanding labor. In my visual response I consider human psychology, cycles of abuse, epigenetics and trauma embedded in the postindustrial landscape.
Almost a century after most anthracite mines had closed, I spent much of my adolescence exploring abandoned mining structures, industrial sites, and machinery in the coal regions, which would become reoccurring characters in my work. I was fascinated by the way these intrusive structures and pieces of heavy equipment become obsolete, set into the postindustrial landscape as memorials to the passage of time. I often employ paper miniatures in my creative process which I construct in response to places I have been, reducing these large, imposing structures to characters in a personal narrative. The maquette, made of paper, tape, and other found materials, becomes the direct visual reference for the rendering on copper, which is then transferred to paper through the printing process. This distance and multiple transfer from source to finished work speaks to the generational removal and distance from the histories and experiences of my ancestors that I seek to resurface. More recently my models are covered in a heavy carborundum grit or sand. This expresses the fragility of economic and ecological structural systems subjected to a harmful past and a community whose former industry has abandoned them. The carborundum functions as an agent with which to bury something: a memory or difficult history which is purposefully forgotten. Through subtractive intaglio processes and mezzotint, I slowly recover these forms from a black ground to echo the record of wear on the landscape and its local communities.