In a journal entry from the spring of 1965, Susan Sontag writes “The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation — however minute,” The words total and minute seem to have nearly opposite meanings. Yet, looking around the open landscapes of the Western United States, complete and total transformation on a minute scale is everywhere. This land and everything on it is constantly remade. Nothing lasts forever, not even the mountains. The wind blows. The snow melts and everything is becoming something else.

Intimate knowledge of a slowly transforming landscape such as this does not come quickly or easily. It is, as Nan Shepherd writes in The Living Mountain “a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not immediate enough import for its desperate problems.” Yet looking with a patient eye and slowness of mind is worthwhile. It pays its own dividends to the one who waits. Things that appear immutable may be caught in the act of total transformation, however minute.

This series of two-dimensional works depict patterns of erosion with hand-cut layers of paper. The thin tissue suggests an ephemeral quality, however, they may have more permanence than the metamorphic landscapes they represent.