My process-heavy multimedia interdisciplinary artistic practice is often site-focused and initiated in encounters with environments: it is oracular, ritualistic, and animist in nature. It is, as Gast Bouschet has said of his own work, work that does not primarily derive its significance from publication or exhibition.
Combining photography, video, sculpture, site-specific scultpure and installation, text, drawing, ritual-performance, and psychogeographical walks, in most of these operations there is at least one element where Chance and other more-than-human forces can show their hand. In drawing and writing, the use of tarot cards, dice, and trancework decenters the artist’s conscious mind from authershop; and in photography, video, and installation, analogue reflective surfaces—most often which can move or be moved without and beyond the artist's control—as well as analog, experimental and ecofriendly photographic processes where exposure time and materials defy easily-controlled results, where plants, minerals and water from the local ecosystem are part of the development process, and where appearance and the perception of the passage of time are both interrogated and augmented by subtle and not always knowable forces
Informed by diverse practices and inspirations including Mytho/psychogeography, ancestral and folk magic ritual, Deep Listening, and pilgrimage walking, my work intentionally decenters and reframes the human gaze and narrative, and defies object, commodity, extraction-based models for artistic practice.
Working with mirrors and reflective water is a longtime practice: the uncontrollable and polyvalent visual element aids in de-centering me from a position of authority or extraction in the immediate environment, and places me the human/artist also in a collaborative, receptive, and attentive position, drawing my attention and notice to things beyond habitual mental concepts and somatic perceptions. In taking the hand of chance, as well as on the material level working with the alchemy of silver- and plant and mineral-based processes of analog and ecofriendly imagemaking, I also invite the nonhuman and energetic realms to participate and reveal themselves as they will. Dynamic ever-moving surfaces and long exposures alter the spatio-temporal-ephemeral aspect of practice and process, and the video or image becomes not just a contemplation of the material and the moment but a bridge and a channel between humans and the specific environment, especially the impermanent and immaterial aspects of the natural world. This approach also consciously arises in resistance to the predominant human use of the camera like a weapon of the gaze that seeks out and captures, freezes, and extracts what it holds in its focus.