I am interested in exploring systems of meaning that have been impressed upon nature (flora) throughout the eras of colonialism and globalization. Common to these systems are, for example, the reductive perceptions and the visual representations of plants, by which they are depicted as merely “neutral,” passive, and decorative. Nature as categorized and subjected to human social and botanical constructions demarks the parameters of beauty, perfection, and functionality. Illustrating this is the example of the fern, which quickly became ubiquitous as a decorative motif in bourgeois 19th century England as an exotic plant from the colonies. I use plants typically identified as “weeds” to call attention to the hierarchies of classification, and, congruently, to delineations of social class—to what or whom is deemed undesirable or subject to removal, juxtaposed by a nature that proliferates without judgement. In focusing on plants disparagingly regarded as “weeds,” I am focusing on the binary aspects of inclusion and exclusion. The complexities embedded in the cultural histories of plant representation inspire much of my work. My images of “nature” depict a twenty-first century anxiety towards the natural world; they act as surrogates or metaphors for emotional states of fear, anxiety, desire, and loss. I question the cultural codes placed upon the natural world and where meaning resides. The duality presented in motifs of age-old concepts regarding beauty and the sublime versus the unfamiliar and disturbing, as well as the anxiety and strangeness provoked by objects typically selected to convey visual pleasure (flowers), are starting points for much of my work. I consider myself an image-based artist—the work often draws from the thrust and mutability of the photographic object. I author, find, and or alter pictures in service of exploring new strategies to expand my persisting interest in the shifting of representation—how photography can order and structure the world. Using the large-format photos that I take, or by sifting through cultural sediments of learned and observed images, I transform these images through various digital and analog processes. Overprinting, off-registration, and exploring different substrates allows me to produce interruptions between images and their meanings and to the ways images are mediated through culture. The visual storytelling in both art and design investigations interweave a powerful play with imagery with aims to interrupt habits of seeing. While I manipulate, construct, sample, and reinterpret images, further readings through juxtaposition, re-contextualization, and playing with the indexical power of reproducible images occurs. I am fascinated by the conflation of histories and the confusion that results when something slightly wrong appears in a photo-based print. Where printing (digital) often starts with an image, what might start out as an accident begins to generate its own logic. Technical failures become aestheticized. I choose to work with materials that confound a clear reading, producing a condition for the viewer to process several different readings at once, or that creates after-images alluding to dislocation. This shift can arise from the choice of substrates I print on, or through an off-registration producing a palimpsest; I engage processes that destabilize the reading. Glitches, stutters, and images seen between multiple layers of polished beeswax for example, accentuate perceptual vagaries. Destabilized feelings around discernment occur, moving between visible and invisible, pleasure and loss and capture and convey the ephemeral nature of photo-based images. By these methods, my work coheres around the ineffable nature of perception.