lcbills@icloud.com
For several decades I worked as a sculptor, finding inspiration in nature and materials drawn from it. Limbs, twigs, bark; for years these were my primary materials. Some of my sculptures created shadow drawings on the floor or wall. They peaked my interest and soon I began making actual drawings, on paper. Prints followed. Ultimately, inspiration was coming full circle, sculpture inspiring drawings and prints and those, in turn, inspiring sculpture and installations.
By mid-2000 I had moved away from creating sculpture. By the twenty teens I was taking ZMP workshops. And in 2016 I bought an etching press.
I now live permanently in Western MA where it’s a short walk to the woods for hiking. There is a lake, the marsh, and trees surrounding our house. I find it a place of beauty, wonder, renewal, and endlessly inspiring.
I experience an aliveness in nature. Like magic, it comes, a gift felt within my body, as a living presence from nature itself. Being wholly experiential, it’s difficult to convey in words the immediacy and fullness of such a feeling. And as an artist I have been asking myself: is there a visual language for my work that would express this same sense of presence? Recently, while working on prints with abstracted tree forms, the phrase, Deep in the Forest, popped into my head, an obvious reference to my tree-inspired imagery. I also saw it as a metaphor for the embodiment of presence that I experience, a mystery that is beyond language but fully felt.
