Endless Forms Most Beautiful

The cyanotypes are physical recordings of natural elements––an osprey wing, sea plants, and my own body––that affirm the fundamental value of all life in its various manifestations. They are evidence of physical existence and, as abstractions in hues of blue and white, also suggest the ethereal world. They invite questions that have formed the essence of my creative investigations for more than 25 years about what lies beyond visual perception, and they aspire to make connections to those unseen realms. A deep kinship with nature has been a constant driving force in my work and the cyanotype medium allows me to explore that relationship anew. I use fallen botanicals and my body in some images. For others, I lay directly on top of low-hanging coastal pine tree branches. With these works, I also revisit the notion that we––humans, animals, and plants––are made of the same organic matter and I assert that our elemental sameness calls for respect and unity. The use of the cyanotype medium represents my recent and growing interest in unmediated contact with materials––natural elements, paper, and light––and a curiosity about what might manifest from the synergistic connection between those materials and myself. I am less concerned with replicating the world as I am in imagining the unseen. The photographs in this body of work, as black and white abstractions of the world, allow for another kind of representation of imagery that suggests essential matter and the celestial world. Endless Forms Most Beautiful borrows its title from the last lines of Darwin’s Origin of Species. While his theories are rooted in the material world of atoms and molecules, the words also describe what may exist beyond it.