Creating art and landscapes to help cultivate reverence, remembrance and kinship is my passion.
I love to read the intricate pattern language of evolution; to reveal truth in the subtleties of diversity; to commune with the embodied wisdom of ancient flora and fauna and the ephemeral poetry of the elements. I am devoted to the practice of loving observation.
Everything I create is a memorial to the life we share this planet with, and my way of saying to even the most common life: “I’m so glad you’re here.” Through it, I desire to create community for us to share and express our heartache over our changing world.
Presently, I find my home and my wonder in the oak woodlands, redwood canyons, sage bluffs, and kelp forests of the Central Coast of California (land of the Rumsen Ohlone and Esselen people). I also belong to the big, soft dunes and hardwood forests of northern Lake Michigan (land of the Anishinaabe people). As an artist, author and landscape architect, I live from a deep relationship to place. Everything I create is inspired through the radical intimacy I’ve spent my life joyfully reclaiming with our beloved Earth – trees and flora; soil and stone; rain, rivers, lakes and oceans; birds and fauna; whales; sun, moon and seasons; wind and sky; fire, snow and ice; every color and every pattern that evolution offers to our imagination… Alongside poet Mary Oliver, I truly feel that “My work is loving the world,” and that, as agrarian author Wendell Berry states, hope for our world “all turns on affection.”
As an author, I am driven to explore the depths of our relationship to nature and place, ecological grief, displacement, and belonging. My fifteen-year career in landscape architecture was spawned by early years hands-on in organic horticulture, ecological restoration, a BA in fine arts, aerial photography, and the influence of time in Italy. A breadth of rich experience in site and land use planning spans many geographies, sectors, unique clientele, and exciting architectural collaborations. My present focus has become distilled to focus on meaning-making in place through therapeutic memorial landscape design, private and public art, and interpretive work. My origins as a serial photographer still inform most of my two-dimensional artwork, which now includes pattern design, natural-dyed textiles, embossed prints, and simple woodworking. Everything I create is an invitation to reverence, wonder and kinship.
“Lean in, the veil is thin, all of life is sacred kin.” Laurence Cole (Disastrous and Sublime)
“All flourishing is mutual.” Robin Wall Kimmerer
*Jessica Dune is a chosen name, and represents an evolution from previous business entities JMLA and Anima.