Inside the Studio

The Pacifica series is based on a set of small watercolor and gouache paintings I made while spending time exploring the Sunshine Coast in Australia in June 2024.

Natural rhythms, reflective skies, and deliberate forms encapsulated my time in Coolum Beach and the Mooloolaba Harbour area.

On one memorable day, my family and I spent the mid-tide hours with world-renowned nudibranch expert Gary Cobb, crouching in beach tide pool environs to discover a myriad of sea slugs. Alongside this slow, meditative search, I clambered over an extensive variety of well-worn coastal rocks in every imaginable shape, texture, and size.

My impressions of this place, and its unique geologies and biologies, stayed with me while making the Pacifica series. The series was begun in Hawai’i, as one image for a project with the University of Hawai’i at Hilo, which you can read more about here.

A year later, back in the studio in Kansas City, I worked with my studio assistant Emily Earp to produce an edition of four new relief prints in this series. For five months, working twice a week, we produced an edition of 10-12 of each of the images in this collection.

By the numbers, this totaled: 43 individual printing plates and more than 70 handmixed ink colors. With 4-6 runs through the press for each composition, across 50+ prints total, this meant over 700 runs through the press, and tens of thousands of brayer rolls reaching across the ink slabs.

Each moment of making the Pacifica prints echoes their content; the evolution of space, and how it is created by tiny movements exchanged from one form to another.