Stones, "fields," street signs, bricks, and textual remnants animate these paintings. Throughout New England, colonial practices have scarred the land in ways integrated and obscured by the romantic American visual regime. Fieldstone walls, for example, are a byproduct of colonial agriculture and property law. When colonists encroached on native land and cleared fields for English-style agriculture and settlement, stone walls accumulated at their margins. Each winter, water penetrated the loosened earth and froze, heaving new stones to the surface, so that the fields needed to be cleared perpetually. These stones, lifted against gravity, remain on the surface, patterning the landscape with romanticized indices of labor and the slow violence of colonial agriculture. Empty fields rhyme with empty green highway signs, which around here are so often marked with transliterated Algonquian words.
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