Wild Rivers Series

In Wild Rivers, I map selected rivers of the Earth in a decorative, unruly visual language—forms that bend, tangle, and elaborate beyond strict geography. Titles carry a sense of personality, inviting a more intimate, relational encounter. The work leans into a human attraction to what is ornate and visually seductive, using that impulse as an entry point.

Each piece is built through layered collage and ink. River forms are drawn and reworked by hand, often embellished with patterned or decorative papers, allowing the compositions to exceed the logic of conventional maps. The materials themselves—cut, assembled, and adjusted—mirror the shifting, meandering nature of the rivers they depict.

Beneath the playfulness is another orientation. In many older cultures, rivers were understood as living presences—beings to be honored rather than managed. By contrast, contemporary mapping often renders them as systems to measure, divide, and control. Here, mapping becomes less an act of definition than of recognition.

The rivers in this series resist containment. They move between representation and invention, as if slipping beyond imposed boundaries. At the same time, the work holds a tension: the same human attraction to beauty that draws us in is not separate from the impulse to possess or exploit. The decorative surface does not resolve this—it makes it visible.

Wild Rivers invites a slower kind of attention, where delight and unease coexist, and where water might be encountered again as something animate, vital, and alive.