Hawaiʻi Island is still being made. Kīlauea pushes lava into the sea. New land cools into black stone. My studio sits on a lava lot in Kaʻū, on the southern flank of Mauna Loa, looking out over the south side of Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park.
The landscape is the subject
The images in my relief work come straight from the ground around the studio: the black pāhoehoe, ʻōhiʻa lehua pushing through new rock, the long shield profile of Mauna Loa against the sky. I don't use them as a backdrop. They are what the work is about.
Destruction and what grows from it
Lava is the sharpest, most hostile surface imaginable, and also the beginning of everything. A single fern finds a crack. Then comes the forest. A gas kiln works the same way. It is violent heat, and out of it comes something you can hold in your hand and keep for a lifetime.
Beauty is always here, waiting for us to step inside it — in new growth and in what the fire leaves behind, in every state our world passes through.
Working on a lava lot
Building a studio out here means working with the land as it is. Off grid, on rock, with the weather coming up the mountain. It is slower. It is also the only place this work could be made.
See what this place has made in the gallery, or read the full story.