Citytown is a game I play with my kids

At the playground sweep a little hollow into the tanbark. Make the kids run around and collect some sticks. Stick them into the soft, damp tanbark. You’ve made a Citytown! Appreciate the smell. Maybe make some leaf boats. If you want to, add some gum nuts to the tops of some of the sticks, like little domes.

These works are about the intersection of a few things:

play; playing with my kids, the joyful spontaneity and also the comforting (and often boring) repetition; the joy of just poking sticks in clay and seeing what emerges.  My fears and grief about climate change; what our cities and people do to the world; what the future will bring for my children, for the children I know, and don’t know.  The remembrance of my own childhood; the nostalgia for the particular environment and climate I grew up in, and my inability to clearly discern between my childish feeling that nature was more bountiful then (so many insects!), and my true adult knowledge that insect life, and non-human life in general, is in catastrophic decline.