Flint Hills Reliquary
Reticulated Sterling Silver, Red Brass, CZ, Flint from Cassoday County, Kansas, segment of prose statement
As for me, I am a maker: it is the only reason why I’m here on this green earth, and it is why I was born in the land and wish I was born. I am from the deep hills of Kansas, and a child, I grew up near the confluence of the Big and Little Arkansas Rivers.
The first artistic attempts were in direct reaction to the land. Worshiping, attempting to understand it in order to placate and ease it’s whims. In most cases, I do much the same: I work heavily within the my lineage of place and my memory of blinding, shining grasses with the rolling wind in the spring then gold and burning summer when the sky is most unkind sick and silver in the winter when the sunflowers have long died and the cattle have grown thick and with fat and fleece as they huddle close in the cottonwoods to escape the cold.
When I lived in St Louis with my father and my siblings, we came to Kansas twice a year: in the blessed burning of summer and the stripping, cloying grip of the cold and on the way, just an hour out to our home town, you will find them: the Cassoday County Municipal Cattle Pens. Cassoday County, a loose association of cattle ranches (mostly Angus) is a place that I consider to be more sacred than most: there, the Angus are lead to slaughter, and it is beautiful beyond belief. There are many bits left behind from the rituals of their passing: tufts of cattle's fleece, thrown shoes of horses, blown tires of ATVs. The flint of the hills, of course, crumbles and recedes, grinding back into soil and rebuild into bluffs and little cliffs that shield the creeks and clumps of thistles in the spring.
