As the safety and human rights of marginalized people in the United States progressively erodes, I feel driven to build and rebel. My current work focuses on the relationship between queer ecology and American Indigenous and contemporary Buddhist philosophies of interconnectedness. I want to reinvigorate an atrophied instinct to be gentle with the earth and its beings by realizing the intrinsic connection between everything and everyone. The tendency toward anthropocentrism and greed has led to a diminished culture of compassion, so that western patriarchal barbarity and control has been imposed upon the ancient diversity of our natural world. Regardless, nature transcends the constructs of imaginary binaries, as evident in the biology of intersexual reproductive organs, fluid animal relationships, and sexual and asexual reproduction.

My most recent artwork features my partner and queer friends, set against a background of flora and funga that exemplify, either biologically or symbolically, queer plants and fungi. Some of the symbolic plants include, the green carnation which acted as a secret gay symbol in the 1980s, violets have been associated with the Greek poet Sappho, the term pansies was reclaimed by drag queens, and roses symbolize trans pride. I feel consoled by the prolific reflections of queerness in nature, and excited by the idea that natural world exposes heteronormativity as rather unnatural and maladaptive for the continuity of most living species.

As a young genderqueer gay woman, my safety feels acutely threatened by the escalating justification of tyranny that propagates now through the psyche of our country. Queer bodies feel so vulnerable right now; and concurrently as the forests are charred and incinerated and stripped of their trees, we’re being hunted. This vulnerability doesn’t equate to weakness, however, but courage and strength. As our cyclical history tells us, it doesn’t matter if they burn our forests on the surface, queerness is planted firmly into the soil and stone of our earth, connected to everything in symbiosis like mycelium and the roots of an aspen tree grove. I believe in an interconnected web of fluidity in nature, and assert intersectional queer representation as a permanent fixture; like our most tenacious lifeforms, even in the event of mass environmental destruction through climate catastrophe, queerness will prevail.