August 2025

Thin Air, Clear Color

I’ve been thinking about how perception changes with altitude. At 10,000 feet, the body feels time differently, breath shortens, light sharpens, horizons stretch. The sky takes on a depth of blue that can’t be found at sea level: ultramarine, nearly cosmic. This summer, I ran and finished the Never Summer 100K, a 64-mile mountain race in northern Colorado that climbs over passes, drops through basins, and hovers near tree line for hours at a time. You start in the early grey light of morning, when the peaks are still shadows, and you don’t finish until nearly midnight, when the sky has given everything it can, dawn, heat, storm, dusk, and starlight. Out there, endurance isn’t just distance. It’s learning to see through time, to carry every shift of light inside the body. I keep returning to what I called Color Maps of the Wild, a body of work first introduced in 2021 and revisited in 2023. Those sculptures grew out of my own time in the mountains, watching elk, mule deer, and bighorn sheep move through their ranges, and combining that lived observation with GPS migration data. The resulting forms were abstract yet rooted in survival: lines and geometries that traced endurance across altitude, valleys, and ridgelines. Looking back, much of my earlier work carried the mountain directly, fragments of horizon, landscapes abstracted into bronze and paint. It was restless, exploratory, searching. Now the work has shed those references. What remains is more pared down: geometry, interior passages, vibrant color. Not about describing place, but about being present in it, how voids invite the body to move, how color saturates vision, how perception unfolds slowly in silence. It feels less like a break than a refinement, a shift into clarity. The forms are leaner, the language tighter, the intent more grounded. A new phase, but one still tethered to altitude, endurance, and time.