I am a multi-disciplinary artist dedicated to exploring the intersection of nature, art, and design. I have more than fifteen years of experience designing and building landscapes in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies, the foggy hills and valleys of San Francisco, a New York City rooftop, and most recently, for the Living Temple Gardens at the Kauai Hindu monastery. I graduated with Fine Arts and Landscape Architecture degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design, where I first experimented with alternative building techniques and laid the groundwork for a lifelong hybrid practice integrating painting and installation arts with public and private garden design.
I apprenticed for five years under Martin Mosko, founder of Marpa, a landscape design firm in Boulder, Colorado, whose contemplative design philosophy creates spaces of respite and intimacy with nature. Building on this knowledge, I founded and ran the design/build firm Studio Forma from 2002 to 2007 before moving to San Francisco. After two years collaborating with The Garden Route in South San Francisco, I worked out of a studio in Portland, Oregon, making studio art full time until my relocation to Los Angeles in 2013.
I grew up in Boulder, in a small house on the edge of the “greenbelt,” where the city meets the mountains. At nineteen, an exploration of European gardens, courtyards, plazas, and parks revealed to me how nature could be a symbiotic element of a built environment. I experienced for the first time how an artistic spirit in design can shape space to invite human wonderment. My lifelong practice as a visual artist led me to fuse site-specific strategies of landscape design with my painting practice; I poached techniques from one discipline and “mis-used” them creatively in another to generate inventive and encapsulating spaces. As my work led me to confront issues of urban density in multiple cities, I drew on inspiration from early pioneers in the arts who coupled aesthetics and biology into living sculpture, and the recent vertical garden movement. This evolution led me to the creation of container gardens as a way to reintegrate nature into urban living and to cultivate healthier indoor environments.
Root Volume is based in Los Angeles, California.