Holy Ground: Drawings and Practices of Pilgrimage is a series of  colored pencil drawings on paper born during 2025, a year of both violence and uncertainty, and reminders to remember and celebrate: 
 
the 800th anniversary of St. Francis' Canticle of the Creatures,
the 50th anniversary of both the Catholic Committee of Appalachia's first pastoral letter and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,
the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si, and
the Jubilee Year, themed "Pilgrims of Hope."

These drawings document a theme present in all of the texts listed above: pilgrimage. I approach pilgrimage broadly as a sacred journey of transformation rooted in place. 

Holding a question related to pilgrimage and care for creation in my particular geography, these drawings ask what does it look like visualize the invisible natural gas flowing through the recently implemented Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), a 300 mile long fracked natural gas project that cuts through the Appalachian Mountains?  

Each drawing started with a fragment, ephemera from daily life: a piece of text, an observational
drawing, a doodle, a stain. With colored pencils I mapped out and developed the forms through a
labor-intensive, meditative process that revealed cellular, micro-, macro-cosmic shapes flowing into
one another. I used a palette of yellow ochre, olive green, mahogany, tuscan red, cerulean, and indigo blue, colors I associate with both the Greenbrier River (one of the largest MVP water crossings) and the pipeline construction sites. Each drawing culminated in an organic form, scaled to roughly 42 inches, the circumference of the pipes used for MVP.  

Through the repetition within these constraints of color palette, scale, and medium, I practiced being aware of new possibilities and delighting in subtle variations that emerge; staying awake to the harm caused by this extractive energy and its proposed expansions (and my participation in these systems); and finding ways to keep building communities that are grounded in care for creation. I was surprised to remember at the end of the project that the natural gas is itself is on a kind of nonconsensual pilgrimage, too--it really didn't want to be violently forced from its resting place deep in the earth. I might lament the pipeline, but how to have empathy for this substance that doesn't want to be forcibly displaced and transformed into a fossil fuel...

Preparation for the exhibition included using the home repair skills I'd cultivated over the past three years as a Caretaker at Bethlehem Farm: painting the entire woodshop by hand (the plywood required several coats of paint!) and trimming out the windows. I displayed the paintings in the Danny Keith Maintenance Garage at Bethlehem Farm during the Season of Creation (September 1-October 4, culminating with the Feast of St. Francis) for Bethlehem Farm's 20th anniversary reunion celebration and the Catholic Committee of Appalachia's Annual Gathering.