(slow soft music) - When I'm in the studio, then I'm able to sort of create and build on a fantastical language.

I'm looking at different angles, different poses, facial expressions, lighting, sometimes the color behind me.

When all of this is working together, the sense of the human person as an individual, me, almost sort of vanishes and the creature emerges for that, that moment that is captured on camera.

(camera beeping & clicking) (slow soft music) (slow soft music continues) A lot of my work is exploring our connection with other species and sort of seeking to reconnect.

(slow soft music) Making this work in a time of environmental crisis, there's a deep awareness for me and, and tension and mourning over what is happening to our natural world.

And I'm really interested in our relationship with other species and the sort of sense of false separateness.

(slow soft music) We are living creatures who are part of these ecosystems and we're not just acting upon them, but we are vulnerable to the consequences of our actions.

(slow soft music) The climate crisis needs everybody.

Finding a way to build community that invites the full range of what people have to contribute in is really important.

And so for me, that is through this work.

(slow soft music) I like to say that "Zoomorphics" is not a eulogy, that it's not a dirge.

And in my work, I think there is not only this, this tension, but also this sense of wonder and joy because I love being out in the natural world and I'm still really excited and interested in the nature that can be found even in urban and suburban places, the sort of semi-wild places where I've spent most of my life.

(slow soft music) Red Bellied Woodpeckers live in Rhode Island and Massachusetts and other parts of the country heading south along the East Coast, and they can be found in backyards and wooded places.

So that struck me as an interesting opportunity to dwell on place and what is local to us.

Woodpeckers in general can be, you know, annoying to people and that's interesting to me too, to think about.

It's easy to romanticize the natural world, but what actually happens when humans and other species come into contact is really interesting to me.

(slow soft music) (slow soft music continues) Making the work in total can take up to eight hours in a day, you know, including the painting and the photography.

(slow soft music) To me, the real happening is in when all three things come together, the painting, the performance, and the photography.

Because the photograph can capture a particular magic or illusion that that particular moment, that angle, that lighting just brought the sense of transformation together.

For me, as a woman, making self-portraiture, it's really exciting and important to get to make work that expresses the full range of what it is to be alive.

And I'm really aware of the history of women in art.

And even when women have made self-portraiture, often that is sort of erased from the official history over time.

And so to me, it's really important that I am the maker of my own image.

Painting, performing, photographing, to be fully present for that is, is a wondrous thing.

(slow soft music) (camera beeping & clicking) (slow soft music fading)