The series of book paintings entitled “Sediment” address the difficulty in changing the imbedded languages, histories and philosophies that create our social and personal sense of self. These still life paintings of books are meant to show how ways of thinking, like language systems, get passed down from generation to generation and they settle, building systems of belief that can feel as natural as the landscape. It is as difficult to change one’s notion of what is good, beautiful and just as it is to smooth a terrain that rests as a skin upon thousands of layers of rock, sand and clay.

In these paintings, the edges of books take on a look similar to the face of a bluff where layers of sediment, dating back to some unknowable time can be seen from an angle different from the limited perspective of the surface. The colors: browns, earth tones and blues are meant to evoke an image of landscape through an implied horizon line, an indicator of distance and sublimity. A feeling of movement is important because our notions of reality do shift, our deep seeded concepts of self do change, and one must always be prepared for life’s endless waves of transformation. As Felix Gonzalez-Torres states, “[We] think of ourselves as one a-historical phenomenon. We are not what we think we are, but rather a compilation of texts. A compilation of histories, past, present, and future, always, always shifting, adding, subtracting, gaining.” In this shifting of histories, the trace of the self is not only present in the still life, but in the knowledge that is passed down through language.