Larrabee Statement

Larrabee, located on the shores of Samish Bay in Bellingham, is the oldest state park in Washington. Its beaches are graced with intricately eroded formations of Chuckanut sandstone. The stone embodies frozen waves, sensuous curves, intricate folds, and masses of honeycombed indentations. This series, which I worked on for four years, began when I found intriguing compositions in the up-close examination of the eroded outcroppings. These abstract compositions were a springboard for explorations of scale, form, color, and mark-making techniques. Often the results had a monumental quality, even though they originated in close attention to small details.

The smaller prints, while complete in themselves, were also building blocks for the larger Larrabee compositions. In this context, they became visual vocabulary units, which I combined, overlapped, rotated, masked, etc. to create more complex statements. The harmony and synergy of these prints in combination still delights and fascinates me.

As a poet and word puzzler, I was pleased to read in the dictionary that “suite” not only means “a group of things forming a unit or constituting a collection” and “a modern instrumental composition in several movements of a different character,” but also “a collection of minerals or rocks having some characteristic in common (as type or origin).” I pay homage to all three meanings in the Larrabee Suite.