Cataract Falls (Laurel Tie), 2024, Acrylic, pastel, natural earth and mineral pigments on linen, grommets, 42 x 68"
Filtered green light cascades where Cataract Creek flows toward Alpine Lake, a landscape connected to the Laurel Tie Memorial honoring the Chinese railroad workers who built America’s infrastructure.
Between 1865 and 1869, Chinese workers made up 80-90% of the Central Pacific Railroad workforce, and thousands carved through granite mountains with hand tools, endured brutal Sierra Nevada winters, and lived in temporary camps along creekbeds like this one. They faced explosions, landslides, and accidents while working with dangerous black powder and nitroglycerin, with hundreds dying in the process.
The Laurel Tie itself came from a California laurel tree on Mount Tamalpais, serving as the ceremonial “last tie” for the Transcontinental Railroad at the 1869 Golden Spike ceremony.
Yet just thirteen years later, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 became America’s first immigration law to target a specific ethnicity, providing an absolute ban on Chinese laborers entering the United States.
The laborers who constructed the railroad were frequently denied access to the very transportation network they built, and their experiences trace an unbroken line from historical injustices to contemporary violence and exclusion faced by immigrants and workers.
Cataract Falls (Laurel Tie), 2024
Acrylic, pastel, natural earth and mineral pigments on linen, grommets
42 x 68" Cataract Falls (Laurel Tie), 2024
Acrylic, pastel, natural earth and mineral pigments on linen, grommets
42 x 68" Cataract Falls (Laurel Tie), 2024
Acrylic, pastel, natural earth and mineral pigments on linen, grommets
42 x 68" Big Basin Mycorrhiza, 2024, Acrylic, pastel, natural earth and mineral pigments on linen, grommets, 42 x 68" Big Basin Mycorrhiza, 2024, Acrylic, pastel, natural earth and mineral pigments on linen, grommets, 42 x 68" Big Basin Mycorrhiza, 2024, Acrylic, pastel, natural earth and mineral pigments on linen, grommets, 42 x 68"
I painted Big Basin four years after the August 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fires devastated California's oldest state park, documenting recovery during regular visits along Highway 1. The composition shows redwood fairy rings as family clusters connected by mycorrhizal networks that I carved directly out of the paint, making visible the underground fungal threads that share nutrients, water, and chemical signals between trees. These networks function as mutual aid systems, ensuring redwoods exist not as individuals but as interconnected communities supporting each other's survival and regrowth over time.
Big Basin Mycorrhiza, 2024, Acrylic, pastel, natural earth and mineral pigments on linen, grommets, 42 x 68"
The painting acknowledges both the destructive power of the 2020 fires and fire's historical role in this landscape, where Indigenous peoples practiced cultural burning for thousands of years before the colonization of the Americas. These traditional burning practices involved burning smaller, controlled fires that promoted forest health and prevented the buildup of fuel loads. Decades of fire suppression policies that replaced these practices contributed to conditions that allowed the 2020 fires to burn with unprecedented intensity.
Tracing and carving mycorrhizal (root-fungi network) pathways into the paint and linen surface, I sought to reveal how forest communities rebuild through collective resilience and symbiotic relationships extending far below ground. Through repeated observation and kinship with Big Basin, the painting explores the profound interdependence that makes healing possible, whether in redwood groves adapting to new climate-changed conditions or human communities learning to share and take care of one another.
Baby Yak in Shangri-La, Yunnan, China 中国云南香格里拉的小牦牛, acrylic on linen, grommets, 8 x 10”, 2024 Amy's Redwood (1983-2022), acrylic on linen, grommets, 42 x 67”, 2024 Amazon Wildfires (São Paulo, BR), acrylic and pastel on linen, grommets, 11 x 9.5", 2024