At different times in my art career, I have created installations and small earthworks as an integral part of my art. Through my wanderings around Colorado and the West, I’ve found the landscape to be filled with vernacular earthworks—earthworks not made by artists nor possessing the intent of being fine art, but of necessity.

These earthworks serve the purpose to fence in livestock, gather and hold water, lay roads, create demarcation of ownership. The traces of human intervention are evident everywhere. Patterns, laid out by surveyors in varying geometric shapes, have greatly influenced our view of the Western landscape.

My recent work explores vernacular earthworks and methods of demarcation from the quilt-like grid of the Public Land Survey System to the flowing vara strips or lineas laid out by Spanish settlers in Colorado and Northern New Mexico. They have provided me the opportunity to make works of art that celebrate, question, and meditate on the confounding and emotional issues of how humans occupy and alter the landscape.