I was an artist in residence at the Joshua Tree National Park for the month of November, 2015. I logged my activities each day. Some days, the entries were lists of little ideas, not fully written out. Sometimes it’s hard to talk about an idea before it has bones, sometimes talking about it is just what it needs to be fleshed out.

I had a busy few months leading up to the residency. A week and a half was the longest I had stayed in one place for three and a half months, so three weeks in a cabin in the middle of the park sounded perfect.

Upon arriving, I was asked about my proposed project. I described it as an unbound, multi-media book tracing human and nonhuman land use in the park. I dug through the park archives, hiking and photographing, taking notes, mapping, volunteering with the wildlife ecologist, and gathering stories of people’s encounters with nonhuman creatures by facilitating story circles in the visitors centers. All of the material I gathered was assembled into layers of documents, cutouts, notes, and photographs. A copy of the physical book will live in the park archives. An alternative assemblage of pages from the book will be available online.

I gave a presentation about my project at the Black Rock Nature Center as part of the parks evening program of presentations by park rangers. It’s incredible that the park invites artists working in multi-disciplinary modes, and not only traditional modes of landscape painting or photography. But to a non-art audience I find it very challenging to define what I do. I define my practice as research based, and when people ask me “what my art is” I say that I make multi-media archives that explore human and nonhuman environmental relations to a particular place. I’m not entirely satisfied by my answer, but I’m also not entirely sure who my audience is. I’m not so interested in showing work in galleries, but in more community-based spaces such as environmental organizations or national parks, where the audience often doesn’t have the access points that an art audience might. This is my challenge.

I love art for its willingness to deal with the odd and the uncomfortable. I’m interested in its ability to transform ways of knowing. But this implies that there is a right and a not so right way to know things, which can lead to didacticism, so often a characteristic of political art and the high art elitism that shuts people out. These are not easily resolvable issues, but I was glad to have the time and space to feel them out for a while.