A Conversation with Nature

I find myself revisiting this self portrait series I first started many years ago, time and time again. The concept seems so simple yet becomes complex in it's delivery.  To place the human form in nature, becoming part of the tree, to blend into it's roots and lets my finger tips become the bark and my arms the limbs. As I began the process of wrapping myself around the large roots of this historic banyan tree, I started to realize that this series was so much more then just fitting the human form into nature. We as humans are natural creatures that not longer belong in nature. We live in boxes where we control the type of air circulating through it, we buy our food from stores with no windows and we have no problem bulldozing the nature elements of this world just so we have a flat path to drive our un-natural automobiles down. Global warm? People still question it even though it is happening all around us, yet we still put plastic straws in our cocktail and get to go meals in styrofoam.  This self portrait series has now become an ode to nature. it touches on how much we as a society have lost sight of where we really came from, the earth. I became the tree because I wanted to know the tree, I wanted to feel the tree.  Because that tree is why we are here.