Lost Forever, Still Known is a series of charcoal and blue graphite works inspired by my recent visit to Glacier National Park, 5 years after a month-long artist residency in the park that left me longing to return. Rebecca Solnit once wrote: "Blue is the color of where you are not, and the color of where you can never go." Blue fills the space between us and the objects we wish were closer, the way our atmospheric distance from things, like mountains, appears more blue the farther away you get. Time passes, glaciers melt, ecosystems die and transform, fires cleanse, stones wither, rivers carry all things to the sea. The world around us changes, and the familiar distances itself from us eventually and entirely. Blue then becomes the color of our longing, and so this series is both a eulogy and a love letter to a beloved place that will someday, in the ways we see it now, be lost forever to us, yet known still in our memories.


The title Lost Forever, Still Known is from lyrics to the Hozier song Butchered Tongue: “You may never know your fortune until the distance has been shown between what is lost forever, and what can still be known.”