2025
“The 2025 was the year I learned my mother had leukemia, that my mother-in-law had brain cancer, the year my friends Linda and Carlos died. 2025 was also the year I got my first show in Los Angeles, my work featured at it’s first major art fair, and my first Manhattan solo show. I got Reiki and I cried the whole time. I started therapy again and couldn’t cry at all. I quit drinking. I tried to quit saying the word ‘always.’ I tried to go to Mexico City three separate times to see my work in a gallery there, and, by the end of the year, the gallery had closed. I stood out on the edge of the prairie my husbands grandmother seeded before either of us were born and watched as what seemed like millions of fireflies twinkled in greens, yellows, and blues. I wrote my first poem in many years. I had to get skin cancer cut out of my back, and it ruined the tattoo I got on my 18th birthday (a scorpion). My word of the year was ‘TRUTH’ and I made the resolution to tell everyone I possibly could that I loved them without fear that they would love me back. I didn’t make as much work as I thought I would. Here is what I did make.” - Terra
And Still I Marvel, 30 x 40 inches, Eraser Drawing.
Excerpt from Cloud Collecting…
“When I was a child, I loved astronomy. I was never going to be an astronomer because I find math really frustrating, but when I was little we lived in a town where you could see a lot of stars. My family and I sat out in lawn chairs on our driveway to watch them. When we left California for a suburban town in Indiana, where it was too cold for driveway sitting most of the year, my mom would walk my little brother and I over to the local high school to attend planetarium shows. The room would dim and the stars would move in front of us as we learned about constellations and deep space voyagers.
When I think about being a child, I think about the world feeling so large and limitless. As we age, I think our world starts to feel so small. Our adult human problems swell and fill up our sense of expansiveness. In a place like New York City, it can be difficult return to that unknowable vastness, but I feel it when I lay out on my roof and stare at the moon, or the naughty feeling of standing in the center of the street at 4 am before everyone wakes up. I feel it when I’m able to go to a synagogue or cathedral in the middle of the day just the sit, and I feel it when I listen to the music that reminds me so much of being 10 years old watching a planetarium show. ”
(Link to Full Article) (Image: “Inbetween Silky Wings”)
It Looked Right at Me, 22 x 30 inches, Eraser Drawing.
Encounter With Dragonfly Something, 22 x 30 inches, Eraser Drawing
Excerpt from Seven Questions For…
Your work often features geometry in connection to botanical imagery. What connection do you find between those two?
I feel like one of the big cannon event gotcha moments of an intro to astronomy class is that question, “how do we talk to aliens? What is the universal language?” And in general, math is seen as this universal language because 1+1 can only equal 2. But in the realm of theoretical and experimental math, 1+1 is complicated further based on the nature and context of 1. So when I’m thinking of math and geometry in the universe, it has it’s place but it’s still based on an earthling perspective of reality. (And that’s okay! I am an earthling!)
I’m very inspired by spirals, symmetry, and radial forms as divine structures that can scale in both directions. When I draw, those shapes often show up without me planning them, and I reinforce them once I trust their presence. I think they emerge naturally because they’re part of the patterning of the world, and when I’m in sync with the work, I’m also in sync with those patterns.
I also think of geometry and symmetry (and additionally, botanicals) as a natural way to approach beauty. I haven’t fully unpacked why beauty and softness are both so important to me right now. That’s the great part about working in this manner. Things have been revealed to me years after I’ve finished the images. Maybe there’s something to the idea that geometry feels eternal and unchanging, and plants feel vulnerable, alive, and alien. (Leave a potato in a cupboard too long. That’s an alien!) When they come together in a drawing, something opens up.
Also, anyone interested in learning more about our research into the theory of alien language should read Daniel Oberhaus’ book, “Extraterrestrial Languages.” It made the world feel so much bigger.
The Hush, 18 x 22 inches, Eraser Drawing
The MAIA Triptych, Three 5 x 7 inch panels, Eraser Drawings.
What are your thoughts on the “Dark Forest” theory?
God, I’m not sure what’s more sinister, the Dark Forest or the Human Zoo.
For those unfamiliar, the Dark Forest theory suggests that the reason we haven’t encountered alien life is because intelligent civilizations are actively hiding. They fear a larger, more dangerous force in the universe, so they remain silent and invisible. Meanwhile, we’re out here shouting into the void with neon signs and radio waves, announcing a free buffet to the cosmos.
Carl Sagan once said that humanity should behave like the new and emerging species it is by watching, listening, and learning. I think there's wisdom in that.
I find the Dark Forest theory just as plausible and cinematic as any other. I personally lean towards the possibility that we haven’t encountered alien life because we’re out here on the galactic edge, in a backwoods spiral arm of the Milky Way, and our technology is still embarrassingly primitive by cosmic standards. We might be like a lost hiker in the Alaskan wilderness, alive and shouting to miles and miles of empty snow.
It’s also possible that alien life is all around us. It could exist as dark matter, or take forms that defy our basic perceptual frameworks, like entities that move like light, both wave and particle, flickering between material and immaterial. If we’re prepared to expect the worst, we should also practice expecting the best, or, at the very least, the benign. That mindset matters not just in how we think about the universe, but also in how we approach one another.
Carl Sagan also wrote in Contact, “You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.”
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