The images from Snowbound describe a cultural landscape in which the objects of our recreation and occupation merge with the natural world while subtly restraining it. In these familiar spaces, transformed in winter not only by a blanket of snow, but also by a state of inactivity, we are offered glimpses of the sublime. These explorations speak to metaphor, and seek to comprehend our human place in this world.
 
On the surface, these images are quite beautiful. They appear elegantly simple and accessible, evoking, perhaps, the silent tranquility that one might feel after a fresh snowfall. Beneath the surface, however, there is a subtle tension. Like fine haiku, each image subtly references another season, a time of life or activity that has already passed, and may come again.
 
These quiet ruminations are very much informed by a reference to drawing, painting and sculpture. Three-dimensional reality is translated and flattened into two dimensions in the snow, which functions as the ideal positive/negative space. Poles and ropes and footprints in the snow recur throughout this series, functioning like human "marks" that reference drawing on a canvas of reality. Even the objects of fascination, an above-ground pool or a snow-laden trampoline, function as found sculpture that resonates with human qualities.
 
Throughout the series run the leitmotifs of poles and ropes and a palette of man-made color. The relationship between the human and the natural world becomes more tightly intertwined as the series progresses, and the cycles of life and death and transformation fold inward.
 
This interest in time passage and life cycles becomes distilled in explorations of water itself. Ice, snow, fog and water embody the liminal states of a primary element. At times, the multiple forms exist simultaneously. It is as though the thing itself possesses its own counterpoint- and transformation is a constant condition, despite seeming moments of stillness.
 
Lisa M. Robinson