Cassie Vaughan, 'Verdant'

“My work investigates the concept of wilderness as a receptacle for our imagination and the stories fostered by and held in land.  I see painting as an act of excavation and discovery, similar to archaeology. My work is fascinated by a sense of time and place that is both ancient and continually shifting; independently alive and steadfastly indifferent. As such, my paintings are spaces of mystery, outside of time and occupying a tipping point between dissolution and permanence. They speak of the compulsion to be lost in landscapes that overwhelm us, even as we threaten to overwhelm them.”