Trees, Networks, and the Intelligence of Interconnection
The Making Roots series emerges from a paradox that has shaped my life since childhood: I have been repeatedly uprooted, yet I have spent much of my artistic life painting roots. Displacement is not incidental to this work; it is its generative engine. The trees I paint do not grow from stable ground. They grow from migration, from dislocation, from fractured belonging. They grow from the lived condition of being UpRooted.
This distinction matters. I do not treat uprooting as loss alone, nor as trauma alone, nor even as rupture alone. I understand it as a structural condition, one that forces the organism to reorganize itself in relation to changing ground. To be UpRooted is not merely to be severed. It is to be compelled into adaptive intelligence. My roots exist because I was uprooted.
The Making Roots paintings began in the early 2000s, during a period when collapse, fragmentation, and reassembly were no longer abstract principles in my work but lived experience. If Construction / Deconstruction / Reconstruction dismantled the illusion of stability, Making Roots asked a quieter but more dangerous question: What does it mean to belong after belonging has been broken? And what kind of structure replaces the ground after the ground is gone?
The answer did not arrive as narrative. It arrived as trees.
Roots as Primary Language
These roots are not botanical illustrations. They are not naturalistic descriptions. They are not decorative flourishes beneath idyllic canopies. They are nervous systems, vascular systems, memory systems, transport systems. They function simultaneously as biological infrastructure and as metaphors for relational intelligence. They do not grow downward into soil alone. They branch laterally into space, into history, into inherited and invented networks of meaning.
From their earliest appearance, these roots are consciously exposed. I did not hide them beneath the earth. I lifted the underground into visibility. What is normally concealed, support, nourishment, exchange, communication, became the primary visual field. This reversal is not aesthetic; it is philosophical. What sustains us is rarely what is celebrated. What holds us is rarely what is seen.
In these works, the tree is never only a tree. It is an architecture of becoming. It is a diagram of survival. It is a map of how something persists without stable ground.
Being UpRooted as Origin Structure
To be UpRooted, in this sense, is not to lack origin. It is to inhabit multiple origins without resolution. The roots in these paintings do not converge into a single trunk of identity. They tangle, overlap, split, reconnect, collide, and reinterpret themselves continuously. These are not genealogical diagrams that promise clarity. They are living systems that refuse closure.
Over time I came to understand that the metaphor of roots allowed me to externalize a condition that had long structured my internal life. My sense of self did not descend from one center. It branched. It networked. It adapted. The Making Roots paintings became a way to visualize that condition without forcing it into narrative unity.
