After two years I finally completed this work.  The photos were a circumambulatory portrait of a Sycamore tree  that I found in a park in Shanghai, China. I later found that sycamores are native to North America.

Persimmon is an image of Persimmon tree trunk made from a variation on my hand colored, screen print on ceramic technique.  Here I am making a vitreous engobe as my screened media rather than printing, bisque firing and glazing.

The snow covering most details of landscape around the building accentuates the mansion as out of time and space. The mansion and the objects and space within preserve the historic ambiance of the colonial period.  Outside, the context surrounding the mansion is frozen in winter, yielding no clues about the passage of time. A featureless white middle ground separates the historic building from the view of the riverine bay at low tide. This piece is titled “middle ground,” because there isn’t any.

The digital photos that created “Middle Ground” are screen printed with ceramic materials, hand colored, fired in glaze and mounted on wood.

Middle Ground will be in exhibition (artencounterspreservation.org) July 30 through October 15, 2011 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  This is the exhibition statement.

Middle Ground is a ceramic vertical panorama made from photos taken in the deep snow of January this year on the stone wall at the water’s edge.  Displayed here in the council room of the Governor Benning Wentworth, the white void of the snow becomes a signifier of the inability of political entities to bridge differences, come together to find common ground and compromise. Governor Benning Wentworth would be forced from office as a loyalist who could find little middle ground with a pre-Revolutionary war constituency unhappy with his corruption and bent on a war of separation from England and its taxes.  Tax policies are also responsible for the current lack of middle ground between our two political parties.