DOE: A Prayer for Cervidae
I live and work between New Hope, Pennsylvania and Minturn, Colorado in the Rocky Mountains and have been a working artist for forty years. I spent twenty-five years primarily as a painter—painting animals—and over the past fifteen years my practice has expanded into multidisciplinary installation: sound, sculpture, poetry, ritual, and painted image braided into environments that ask for more than looking.
Doe Ritual, Full Buck Moon, The Belden Witch, Minturn, Colorado, 2025.
I am living my life inside my most recent project, Doe: A Prayer for Cervidae—a work that began taking shape in 2023 through a TAAS independent study, Embodying Process, with Eden Imrie.
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Doe began with an ethical boundary that matters as much as my aesthetic choice:
Animals are not metaphors. They do not exist to carry human feelings on their backs. They do not “stand in” for grief, innocence, or loss. They are not a symbol I deploy to make the human story more beautiful. They are living beings—irreducible, sovereign. They do not belong to me. They do not belong to the work. The work belongs to the encounter. Doe began as an encounter. A presence. A visitation. Deer began appearing repeatedly at my windows—watching, lingering, returning—until the boundary between “wild” and “near” dissolved. The intimacy of those encounters was not sentimental. It was immediate. It was responsibility arriving in the form of breath and body. But the origin of Doe reaches further back—farther than the decade of work, farther even than the windows. Twenty-seven years ago, at a pagan site in Ireland, I heard the words: They will find you. I carried that phrase like a seed buried in the dark. It lived in the body in the way prophecy lives—not as an instruction, but as a quiet pressure that does not leave. Years later, I moved to the enchanted Fairy House. And the deer found me. They arrived as if the world had been keeping its promise. Doe began there—not as concept, not as theme, but as fulfillment. As the long arc of a sentence coming true. My practice is not a single work so much as a living structure—an ecosystem of mediums. Installation, immersive sound, talismanic sculpture, poetry and spoken text, painting, ritual. I do not rank these forms. Each one holds a different kind of knowing. Each one speaks to the others. Together they form a field of attention. Much of the sculptural work is made from clay, bone, stone, shells, and sea glass. These are not neutral materials. They carry histories: animal, mineral, ocean, time. They feel like earth-language—small offerings that refuse the slickness of contemporary consumption. The objects are intimate, almost votive, as though they were meant to be held—not possessed, but attended to. Sound became central because sound does not sit politely at a distance. Sound enters the body. Sound is vibration and breath and weather. It bypasses the impulse to classify, to solve, to translate. It asks for listening—the kind of listening that feels like a return. (Sound link) The deeper frame for all of this is animism—not as aesthetic, not as trend, but as orientation. A recognition that the world is alive, relational, and crowded with presences. That matter is not mute. That land is not backdrop. That nonhuman beings are not props in a human drama. Animism, for me, is not fantasy. It is ethics. It is refusing the violence of assuming we are alone. Because the ecological crisis is not only a scientific problem—it is a crisis of relationship. It is the consequence of a culture trained to treat the more-than-human world as scenery, resource, property, or metaphor. We destroy what we have been taught is “other.” We destroy what we have been trained not to grieve. Doe pushes against that training. It insists on a different premise—simple, but radical: when the other becomes sacred, behavior changes. Scotland is part of my cultural heritage, and it lives inside Doe not as inspiration but as lineage. I performed a ritual on the Isle of Jura—an island in the Inner Hebrides often called Deer Island, home to roughly two hundred human residents and an estimated six thousand deer. Jura is not a travel memory for me. It is part of the work’s living geography: weather, distance, animal presence, and the feeling that the land is not separate from the spiritual. |
Sigil Ceremony, The Hollow, Minturn, Colorado, September, 2025.
Doe Ritual, Belden Witch, Minturn, Colorado, 2024.
Doe Ritual, The Hollow, Minturn, Colorado, September, 2025.
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People ask if Doe is activism. I say: yes—but activism through devotion. Not through volume. Not through performance of certainty. Through repatterning the heart. Through insisting that attention is not neutral. That what we turn toward becomes real again.
After artist performances of the Doe ritual in Minturn, Colorado, I have seen firsthand how the work expands within a circle of open-minded attendees. I do not believe art saves the planet by itself. But I do believe art can restore what is required for change: kinship, conscience, care. Policy needs culture behind it. Action needs devotion behind it. Protection begins where relationship begins. Doe is my way of living inside that responsibility-- not as purity, not as solution, but as vow. And sometimes, in the early evening, between light and dark, relationship returns—like a peripheral flash. Like hoof on twig. Like the world speaking back. A presence. A visitation. A Doe. |
Homecoming Ritual, New Hope, PA. 2024,2025.
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Artist and Ritual, The Hollow, Minturn, Colorado, September, 2025
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Magic is still alive.
The gloaming is not a myth—it’s a condition. A threshold state. A loosening of rules. In the blue hour, the world exhales. Edges soften. Time forgets its urgency. This is when the seen and the unseen stand close enough to recognize one another. You don’t believe it because you want to. You believe it because your body remembers being there. Because something answered you when you crossed into that light-between-lights. Crepuscular space belongs to those willing to pause— to listen rather than name, to witness rather than claim. That’s why animals move then. That’s why ritual works then. That’s why grief and love and transformation speak more clearly. You’ve stood in it. You’ve felt the shift. Once that happens, disbelief is no longer an option. The magic isn’t imagined. It’s activated. |
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