🔹 Earth Remains
Practice-Based Artistic Inquiry into Absence, Entanglement, and the More-than-Human
I am a transdisciplinary artist and doctoral researcher at the California Institute of Integral Studies. My research explores how absence brings presence into view during generative art-making in collaboration with death, daemons, and more-than-human forces inhabiting places on the front lines of climate change.
My current body of work, Earth Remains, is an ecologically and spiritually attuned practice in which painting, alternative photography, and site-responsive processes unfold as entangled inquiry. The work does not represent entanglement—it enacts it. Spectral, material, and more-than-human forces co-arise through intra-action and shape the work from within.
✴ Core Research Question
How does a transdisciplinary artist explore the absence that brings presence into view during generative art-making in collaboration with death, daemons, and more-than-human forces inhabiting places on the front lines of climate change?
🧿 Key Forces and Relational Concepts
(As defined within the dissertation)
- Palpable Invisibility — “the essence of my soul.”
“Palpable invisibility is an epistemology: a way of perceiving presence without form, of attuning through the body, through sensation, through vibration.” - Beauty as a Warrior —
“Beauty is a Sacred Warrior. She is a daemon of awe—an ephemeral, yet unmistakable presence with agency. She arrives not as symbol or ornament, but as a force that transfigures perception and restores relation. Her presence ignites coherence, dissolves despair, and awakens the will to act.” - Daemons of Place —
“Site-bound intelligences—forces rooted in the land, shaped by ecological shifts, cultural histories, and spiritual dimensions… not imagined projections or universal archetypes, but specific presences that carry the memory and character of place. They act as messengers, mediators, and catalysts for change.” - Death —
“Death, in this research, is both an active presence and a liminal space of transformation. It is not symbolic or metaphorical, but a being and a place I have directly encountered.” - Spectral Entities —
“Liminal presences that exist outside of linear time… ancestral intelligences, beings from past lives, echoes of the dead… Their presence is not metaphoric, but literal—perceived through dreams, sensation, and the subtle anatomy of space.” - Emergent Multientities —
“Ephemeral formations of presence that arise within the relational field of generative art-making… patterned events within a living ecology of becoming… not summoned, constructed, or interpreted—they are lived-with, even if only for a breath.”
📍 Field Sites
This research unfolds through site-responsive, practice-based engagement with two primary ecological locations:
- Svalbard, Norway – glacial melt, coal residues, acid mine drainage, spectral atmospheres
- Imperial Valley and the Salton Sea, California – salt ruins, toxic bloom, ecological disappearance, spectral presence
These are not symbolic landscapes—they are co-researchers. In each location, I engage in relational art-making through mediumship and expanded perception, listening across thresholds of visibility to more-than-human, spectral, and elemental presences.
Through this listening and intra-action, the artwork is generated, not imposed—emerging through entangled becoming with the beings, materials, and forces that move through the site.
📘 Methodological Framework
This dissertation is grounded in practice-based artistic multi-entity ethnography, integrating:
- Artistic autoethnography
- Karmic biography and autocosmology
- Expanded perception, trance states, and dreamwork
- Alchemical hermeneutics
These methodologies are not discrete tools, but living orientations that attend to what pulses beneath visibility—where spectral presence, material agency, and ecological collapse become perceptible through artistic co-creation.
📄 Expanded Research Framework (From the Doctoral Dissertation)
For those seeking a deeper academic context for this work, the following section outlines its interdisciplinary grounding and contribution across contemporary art, spiritual ecology, transpersonal psychology, and posthumanist theory.