My enchantment with snails began at the Andes Sprouts Society Residency in the Catskills of upstate New York in 2013. The residency took place on a biodynamic farm, and the residents were tasked with helping out as part of our stay there. One day, picking snails and bugs off of the plants in the fields, I set a snail on my ever-present sketchpad, and saw the beauty of the liquid trail it left behind, iridescent and glinting in the sun. I wanted to find a way to preserve that
beauty.
But upon returning to Colorado, I realized that snails are rare here and difficult to find, and there are very few sources to buy land snails online. Obtaining some snails from a friend whose daughter had become bored with them as pets after they’d been discovered in the garden, I set about trying to breed the three that I had, eventually growing them into a large enough community to experiment with. Everything I tried to preserve the snails’ ephemeral trails failed, however - they disappeared under coatings or resins, and left alone, eventually flaked off. I decided to cut them out of the paper the snails had walked on, and in that, also found a beautiful metaphor for the unintended consequences of attempting to preserve nature - my hand, while preserving the trail, was also wiping it away.
In 2017 I made my largest snail work for the Arvada Center’s “Paper Works” show. Twenty feet long and eight feet high, I titled it “two months, twenty snails roughly”, since that’s what it had taken to complete. For the installation in this show, however, I decided to ask people to join me in the library at Redline, where we marveled at the snails’ curious travels and cut the paper together, in community.