The Elements
Imagination | Pictorico photo-weaving | 20x30" | 2025
Old Friends in High Places | Book | Writings and Photographs by David Malinsky
Flowing Falls | Pictorico photo-weaving | 24x40" | 2025
Every Breath we Take | Pictorico photo-weaving | 30x40" | 2026
Going Under | Pictorico photo-weaving | 12x16" | 2024
25 Years | Pictorico photo-weaving | 12x16" | 2025
Water, Clouds, Bristlecone | Oil on Panel | 2x3', 3x4', 2x3' | 2024
On the River Bed | Pictorico photo-weaving | 12x32x4" | 2025
Almost Under, The Sky is Where we Live, History | Pictorico photo-weaving | 16x20" | 2024
Looking Towards the Light | Pictorico photo-weaving | 28x38" | 2025
Artist Statement
My practice grows from the landscapes that raised me. Through fragmented, woven images, my work explores grief, reciprocity, and the impossibility of full repair. The Elements emerges from both personal and environmental upheavals, exploring the tension between us and the natural world. We rely on natural forces, yet we continue to shape and strain them in return.
In 2018, we lost my Uncle, David Malinsky in a hiking accident. My work took an intense shift into a more experimental and tactile form through photo-weaving. I began weaving his images as well as capturing my own using his old camera. (The titles of the works photographed by Malinsky have a coordinating page number in the book I compiled). Weaving is generational, my mother is a basket weaver who taught me the basics at a young age. Through imagery like clouds, water, trees, and the human body, I weave my place back into a world that feels increasingly unstable.
Moving from Maryland to Eastern Washington heightened my awareness of regional climate volatility. During record heat waves in Spokane, I watched videos of floods sweeping homes back East. Rooftops floating away echoed in my mind as I researched projections of sea-level rise. By the summer of 2025, portions of the Spokane River ran completely dry for the first time in recorded history. Months later in December, unseasonably warm temperatures brought rain that pushed the falls to their limit. These extremes inspired Flowing Falls, photographed at that peak this winter.
Looking Towards the Light takes its title from the subject line of the final email I received from my late uncle (see page 183). Malinsky was a prolific writer and photographer who spent his life researching bristlecone pines on Mount Charleston. In that last email, inspired by spring’s renewal, he wrote about light being eternal, always shining regardless of whether our temporary circumstances allow us to see it. Attached was an image of the sun peeking through clouds and bristlecone branches. Two weeks later he went to visit his “Old Friends in High Places” for the last time.
In response, I cut the image, which was never intended to be enlarged or altered, into thin strips, flipping and reorienting them before weaving them back together. This method of weaving became a way to sit with uncertainty, an attempt to accept this major loss. As I worked, I imagined his final moments and wondered if they resembled the image he sent:
Quiet. Peaceful. Beautiful.