Of Quiet Strength

March 14th - April 4th
RiverSea Gallery
1160 Commercial St
Astoria, OR 97103

Opening Reception March 14th, 5pm - 8pm

This body of work is inspired by the life, garden, and correspondence of Emily Dickinson and by the quiet, radical ways she inhabited her inner world. A woman ahead of her time, Dickinson cultivated a life of deep observation, creative devotion, and profound relationship with the natural world. Though much of her work unfolded in relative solitude, her inner life was expansive, luminous, and fiercely alive.

I am drawn to the resonances between Dickinson’s life and my own: the rhythms of a home-centered creative practice, the sustaining presence of a garden and the act of correspondence as a form of connection and intimacy. Like Dickinson, I find meaning not in spectacle, but in noticing, plants pressed between pages, words folded into envelopes, light passing through translucent forms.

This exhibition unfolds across three interconnected bodies of work.

The first centers on correspondence. Vintage envelopes, dipped in encaustic and layered with pressed flowers, reference Dickinson’s extensive letter writing, her poems often traveling folded inside envelopes, intimate and handmade. These works honor letters as vessels of thought, care, and presence, and reflect my own relationship to written exchange as a quiet but powerful form of connection.

The second body of work draws from books and poetry. Vintage book covers are laser-etched with botanical illustrations and, in some cases, lines of Dickinson’s poetry. These altered volumes speak to knowledge held gently rather than authoritative.

The final body of work explores the garden and the act of preservation. Encaustic luminaries and paintings on plexiglass incorporate imagery from both Dickinson’s herbarium and my own. Suspended in wax and light, these plant forms exist between presence and memory.

At the heart of the exhibition is an interactive installation: a moss-covered writing desk that invites visitors to sit, pause, and contribute a word, line, or reflection to a hand-made fascicle. Drawing directly from Dickinson’s practice of binding her poems into small booklets. Visitors are invited to take a pencil with them after they have contributed to the fascicle, each engraved with Dickinson’s words, How infinite I am, as a small reminder of the vast inner life carried beyond the gallery walls.