Artist Statement

Pages Turned, 2001, Etching/Relief print, 19.75" x 23.5"

Abstract

Pages Turned recalls my family’s history with the prairie in the Midwest United States. Three generations farmed the land, producing crops, dairy products and a deeply rooted network of relationships. In 1969 the family homestead and 6,500 acres of surrounding farmland was purchased to build Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a federally funded site to study subatomic particle physics. In 1975 Fermi Laboratory staff and volunteers began to restore 1,000 acres to native grasslands. Their hope is to produce an ecosystem that closely resembles the prairie that my family settled a century earlier.

Printmaking is an appropriate art form to layer ideas and imagery related to the native prairie, the cultivated land, the displacement of family, the opening of the earth’s surface to build an “atom smasher” and a return to restored prairie. The print, Pages Turned, joins my family’s property deed, an image of the corncrib, prairie plants, including the coneflower seedpod, with the physics formula for top quark.