Since 1998 I have been creating and documenting a series of ephemeral floor installations built with countless, small, tropical hardwood shavings. Selected for their place of origin and their intense and unexpected colors, the wood shavings are formed into various shapes and sizes of mounds, waves, depressions, lines, and flat expanses. Hand-formed and held together by gravity and friction, the work is metaphoric, referential, often fun, and sometimes whimsical. The work also imparts a sensual and meditative experience of color, form, texture, and vulnerability. And, in it's fragile state, it comments on our paradoxical relationship with the natural world: a world we have changed so drastically that it threatens our existence. My work lives in a protected space. But once built, the work, like the earth it comes from, needs tending to survive.