Mapping: Baylands Nature Preserve

A month after moving to Palo Alto, I found water and parkland a mile from my house and started running there with my dog, Indie. Mid-stride, I noticed the bright shock of a poppy or the glimmer of water through the reeds, the same way I used to notice things while running through the Wissahickon as a teenager. By following the same routes again and again, I made a pattern with my body, and slowly, that pattern grounded me.

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These forty-nine panels come from my seven favorite runs. Each sequence begins with a GPS line tracing where I actually went and distinguishing water from land. Then I let it go. I add color and play with the route as pure shape, which might be the most fun I have in the studio. I strip the color back out and rebuild the image with graphite, photographs from the marsh, and maps of my own making. By the end of each sequence, the line that began as a record of where my feet went has moved toward abstraction. One panel from each run breaks the pattern entirely, becoming whatever that run seemed to want.

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The Baylands grounded me, but it is also a protected estuary, home to egrets, herons, and hawks whose lives extend beyond my search for footing there. These panels hold both: my own growing sense of belonging and the larger living landscape I ran through to find it.