The Naturalist (diptych)
The title for this work is a reference to Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist (1966). Heaney's poem has a two-stanza structure, my work, The Naturalist, focuses on the first stanza in which the child encounters the natural world with unselfconscious wonder and curiosity, before disgust for the visceral physicality of nature sets in (as described in the second stanza). Heaney’s poem evokes formative experiences in my own life, my artworks are a will to reclaim that half buried, essential aspect of myself, and they are meditations on connection. The physical intimacy of the left panel is paired on the right with a list of adjectives excerpted from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ rhapsodic poem, Pied Beauty (1877), offering an intellectual counterpart to the physical, uniting idea with experience, mind with body. 

This work was specially commissioned by Arkansas Museum of Fine Art for my exhibition, The Naturalist, April 27-October 13, 2024, and has been acquired by the museum.