Dust to Dust is my call to arms for us to protect the land we love, Texas. In my effort to make my art practice more sustainable l began researching how artists made pigments before the advents of plasticizers and such. They most ground up local minerals and used local pigments. And it turns out there has been a huge resurgence in efforts to cultivate this knowledge locally and globally. This piece was created using camp fire ash I collected from a gathering of old friends for the Full Sdolar Eclipse in Kerville Texas.

It is 18” x 24” and is seated in a reclaimed frame, and is held in place using beautiful reclaimed fabric on the back of the frame. This piece was truly a labor of love from start to finish. The panel has no glass to promote for direct connection with the earth materials. It is sealed with cold wax medium to provide for easy cleaning and maintenance over the long term.

Wendell Berry once wrote, “The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.” Decades later, these words hold even greater urgency. As conversations around land stewardship, sustainability, and ecological responsibility grow, so too must our understanding of the land as more than a resource—it is our home, our history, and our future.