Artist’s Statement: As a child, I was carted twice a week across Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range from Hibbing to Virginia and back, past Ironworld, the Mahoning pit, the Bruce Mine headframe, and piles and piles of overburden. This was and is the landscape that ‘Iron Rangers’ (including my European immigrant family) created and have inhabited for more than 100 years. My parents transported me over and around this transformed terrain for violin lessons, but we always returned home to Hibbing, ‘the iron ore capital of the world’. Had it not been for the iron ore mining that dictated this landscape of ‘home,’ none of my family might be here – in Northern Minnesota – or the United States. I left these pit lakes and constructed foothills at the age of 14, never having much considered the history of the region or what created the cultural and visual environment that I love. Now, decades later, I am using composition and improvisation, environmental sound, image and archival material to further learn about and reframe the altered landscape where I learned to play the violin. Mine Songs is a meditation on the future of our relationship with the earth – here on the Iron Range, and elsewhere, intending to create a new lens that asks for reflection on the stories we tell ourselves (or have been told) about history, power, identity, agency.”
