37.13069 °N, 122.31118°W
JUNE 2026
37.13069 °N, 122.31118°W is a meandering documentation of my sustained attunement to a small permaculture ecosystem that emerged from within the burn fields of the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fire, which burned 86,509 acres of the Santa Cruz Mountain forests and 97% of Big Basin.
Yet, in the wake of this great natural disaster, the earth rises once more. Through a collective action of localized ecocommunal care, 27 acres of this site have since been transformed into a space of cultivation, self-sustaining webs of life, community, and ethical dialogue. Permaculture practices rest on a bedrock of earth care, people care, and fair share, and practitioners ground their work in a practice of embedding the subject within the broader ecological context it inhabits.
This redwood witnessed the land through all of it: the life, the death, the chaos, the small sparks of regrowth and birth... It was logged in 2024, but was not utilized because of the rippled curling effect that came from the immense heat it experienced. This soil is living, containing millions of microbial life forms and interpenetrating networks. In sustained painting, I take up that care and capture this place as it lives through a single day.
In the face of the ever-transforming ecocommunity I belong to, I ask how I am cradled by the expansive circles of life that I inhabit.