From 1998 through 2020, I made a series of large scale drawings of monuments from the 12th Century, many of them UNESCO World Heritage sites. You can see this work in the Anastylosis Project gallery. Those pieces were my effort to document the endangerment — by neglect, politics, and climate change — of these sacred spaces from many cultures and religions. Rather than the triumphalist narratives we tell ourselves about World Heritage, the real narratives embodied by these global sites are more political and altogether more nuanced than is generally acknowledged. While I remain convinced of the importance of cultural heritage, I have become more interested in the subtexts of whose stories are being told and the imperialist/colonialist papering over of the uglier parts of the story.

My work has always been dependent on on-site research and preliminary drawings, notebooks of collected imagery, the use of text, and the making of informal artist books to sequence ideas and images. But until 2020, the books were a private part of my practice, rarely shown. Covid necessitated a change. Remaining in the studio focused me to explore on my underlying assumptions. Was I documenting a modern-day Grand Tour? Academic and popular culture sees these sites as fitting into an overarching narrative of “civilization” — a blinkered and limited idea. I came to the realization that my knowledge of the complicated history of each site needed to be made explicit.

To address this problem, I mined my “archives” and began experimenting with how to foreground a much wider range of voices in the format of artist books and large, text- based drawings. While the Anastylosis Project honors sustained human attention, the new work moves from observation to witness. The Consequences of Empire books explore the manifestations of empire, especially how it exerts power. These commonplace books give me the space to include more types of explicit information from a wider range of sources. Catastrophes mount as our knowledge of them metastasizes. The historical record is not promising.

I am not the first artist to be interested in how humans try to look at the unbearable. I am inspired by artists and writers who look at the problematic, finding metaphors and images to help us confront those things we would rather avoid. I am trying not to look away, even as I work to nourish the sense of optimism necessary to persevere.

As so many of us do, in chaotic times, I want to feel that it is possible to be part of an on-going story. These books are a project of remembering, recognizing, and witnessing. The impulse to think about the difficult, the unfair, and the tragic crosses all cultural lines, and offers some comfort that we are not in difficult times alone. We are not unique, and we have much to learn. There is a bigger picture even though we can’t quite see it.