The LADY AS LANDSCAPE series is a personal reflection of life-saving surgeries, paralysis, and healing, as shown through a process of transformation of trauma into beauty. They examine the physical body as the place where the process of life is reborn; incorporating trees, flowers, earth, fire, water, cityscapes, and sky. The expression of stagnation to freedom portrays overhauling paralysis through images of roots, rocks, bubbles and flowers imbedded in healthy, beautiful bodies.

More broadly, LADY AS LANDSCAPE represents in Sclippa’s words,

“the body as landscape, seen through the beauty of the woman: woman as earth, mother earth, how we put roots down (dryads), become the sun (morning moon over mountain), are nourished by nature (skin like bark, hair like leaves, movements of water cascading, bleeding with the moon’s cycle), brightened by flowers (are flowers), stimulated by thorns (acupuncture, thistle, rose thorns), burned on the pyre (“witches,” healers), soothed by stone (hardened into soft marble statues, muscles rubbed out by rounded pebbles), enlivened by love (bubbles bursting forth, water dancers crashing in waves)… and the landscape we wear as the history of our existence (scars, lost organs, burst hearts-breaking, limbs akimbo, bags under eyes, big teeth that want to show themselves, arches of backs that wish to bend further, hands that cannot grasp their desire or that free them as well, breasts swollen with children unborn, atrophied muscles, missing faces, all heart and blood, life in motion)..

I am inspired by many woman of the Verde Valley whom I’ve met that are dynamic survivors, a homage to the history of this land. They have cheated death only to become more beautiful, strengthened by the sheer will to survive and often having hidden the struggle. They are a reflection of the desert itself, in it’s ability to replenish from vast desolation, to bear flowers and fruit.