About
I make cameraless cyanotypes on a floating home in Seattle — pieces with Washington's water and coastline literally in them.
I came to the process as a summer camp counselor on Orcas Island, laying beach and forest finds onto sensitized paper to catch their shadows. It was the most direct way to hand a kid a picture, and it was my own first real lesson in shadow and light. I came back to it years later with the water itself instead of the objects — foraged seaweed, salt, sodium alginate, magnesium, flooded under glass and left in the sun.
What holds it together is scale. The same structures keep turning up in the ocean and in deep space — branching, dispersal, the way a thing spreads out from a center — at sizes that have nothing to do with each other and look the same anyway. I design crew interfaces for human spaceflight at Blue Origin, including lunar landers for NASA's Artemis program, and the longer I spend pointed away from Earth the more I fall in love with this planet. The cyanotypes are where that goes.
Background
- Lead Experience Designer, Blue Origin (2019–present)
- Harvard University, Master of Design Engineering (2019)
- University of Washington, Human-Centered Design & Engineering (2015)
- “Breaking the Karman Line” — Lunch 14: Frontiers, 2020
Also
I write novels too — three so far, the first out on submission. They are under Writing.
I also consult on space systems for film, television, and games that want near-future spaceflight to feel real.