I came to the image of a group of people meditating on land with scuba gear while working on a video in May/June 2014 at the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva, FL. I was using underwater footage (as well as images made on land) to reflect autobiographically on a 2010 car accident. I was interested in thinking through the accident, and the healing that followed, in an environment where all is quiet, calm and neutrally buoyant (but where peril is potentially lurking a split-second away.) One of the images I had hoped to fold into the video was of a group of people meditating with scuba equipment on land.
Working backward from that image, I turned my studio into an ad-hoc dive shop to accommodate the seven fellow resident artists who were willing to participate. What followed found me working once again in the form of an event, or workshop, with collective, experimental learning at its core. In the case of Breathing on Land, I worked backward from an image to discover the seeds of a new project.
Breathing on Land takes group meditation with scuba as a starting point to consider healing, both of the body and its ecology. The image presents the absurdity of hyper-mediation and suggests a sinister, survivalist impulse in the face of environmental catastrophe.  However the practice (of breathing on land with scuba) makes for a kind of assisted meditation. The mild, if not moderate, discomfort of the equipment (its weight, warmth, constraints) keeps the wearer in mind of their body.  The amplification of each breath becomes a kind of involuntary meditation; it is hard not to “show up” for each exhalation when an entire apparatus is calling attention to it.  Further, the experience of a room full of people breathing in an amplified chorus creates a highly unusual and immersive soundscape.