Spirituality of The Loss was exhibited in Katherine G. McGovern’s Third Space Gallery from February 26th to March 5th, 2022.
This work examines my religious experience with nature. I am no longer a religious person. Yet having grown up in forested mountains, I have always felt a connection to trees. The only spirituality I now believe in is an unnamed binding force between all humans and nature. Having lived in Houston for 14 years where trees are scarce, I still feel an inner force that yearns for nature. The steel trees represent this yearning and perhaps even a kind of loss—a loss to physical relocation, to Capitalism, to climate change. The trees are a dichotomy between a cold manufactured death, and organic forms and desires. The round steel bars are barren and sterilized. The act of cutting down is immortalized by the base plates, which utilize aesthetic qualities to perversely accentuate their point of severance. I have used figural representation to conjure deathly beings into space; a metaphor for the death of my own religious faith. These are the ghosts of nature.