Could you walk us through the inspiration for your piece, Tactical Seed Bank Bandolier? 

I make a lot of art about seeds and seed dispersal. Aside from the series of wearable seeds banks I've made egg-based seed bombs painted to look like Faberge Eggs, paper mache based seeds bombs that look like street litter (those I've left around Oakland, CA and Amsterdam), and an ongoing social practice piece about memory and seeds and Alzheimers.

When I started the seed banks I had only ever worked with poppy seeds and was looking to branch out into plants that could have different benefits for the local environment. So I was looking at sets of seeds, things like a kit that would have everything you'd need to start a veggie garden, and this took me to a lot of prepper sites. There were just so many American flags and weird dog whistles to the military and prepping for future societal collapse and it didn't sit well with me. So I decided to channel that discomfort into making a seed bank that was functional and beautiful and delicate and maybe subverted some of that particular machismo I had seen.

In your work, you explore themes like Fabergé eggs and Tiffany stained glass. How do you see these historical symbols connecting to the environment?

There's a particular kind of historical symbol that I'm attracted to in my art, ones that have a redemption arc where they fell from grace and then are redeemed. Faberge was of course the jeweler to the czars. But all those eggs were hidden and looted and scattered to the four corners of the earth before being elevated to the level we hold them in now.

The story lines around Louis Comfort Tiffany and Johannes Vermeer also follow similar paths where they were dismissed and forgotten, only to be "saved" later on through scholarship and changing tastes. I see a lot of parallels between this cultural arc and how we treat the environment. How places like wetlands and prairies are no longer looked at as wasted space, but held in regard for their own unique and necessary contributions to the ecosystem. This process is quite inspiring to me. And I think essential process if we're going to turn around climate collapse.

How does ecology play a role in shaping your work? What were the events and ecological elements that inspired your early work?

I grew up in Napa, CA right where the town morphs into countryside so there weren't a whole lot of other kids in my neighborhood. But we did have a three acre yard with a creek and huge oak trees and a giant outcropping of boulders and all kinds of wild critters. My parents often joked about how I learned to climb trees around the same time I learned to walk -- which is only a slight exaggeration.

So I was definitely that slightly feral child with an enormous bug collection growing up and this connection to plants and soil and rocks runs pretty deep in my life. In fact, starting around when I was five or six years old I spent my summers running a Natural History Museum on our front porch. It was full of all my collections and weird things my dad's friends would lend me. So I had a cougar skin rug and a bear skin rug and a tank of live rattlesnakes and all my rocks and shells and pinned butterflies and whatnot.

Can you discuss the relationship between your guerrilla art projects and the natural world around them?

I have a definite love/hate relationship with making art for galleries. Some times you just want to have a little more autonomy in your practice. Or you want to make art that has a direct social impact. Or you just want to make something without worrying about if you can sell it. That's when guerilla art comes in.

This is art that's meant to be free -- art that NEEDS to be free -- because if you displayed it behind a little velvet rope in a white box with a little price tag next to it it'd lose all it's meaning. I still make gallery art and I still sell gallery art. Not all of my work counts as guerilla art or social practice art. But I carefully maintain a balance that works for me as a professional and a creative being and it brings me a lot of joy.

You work across many mediums—craft, photography, and performance. How do you decide which medium best fits a particular idea?

I do a lot of trial and error and a lot of experiments. Now I'm thinking about how much time and money I spend on that and I'm laughing. But my process is always really research intensive. If you follow me on social media you can usually tell something new is brewing when I start posting a lot about books I'm reading and classes I'm taking and new crafts I'm learning.

Like, right now I'm starting a new series on Jan Van Eyck and his status as "the father of oil painting" so the world is about to see me post a whole lot about making pigments and traveling to Ghent. Now, I definitely have an outline in my head about where I'm taking this series, but really, it's going to gel over the next four to six months when I start getting my hands ditry. Then we'll know if this is going to be craft or perform

For artists wanting to engage in public or guerrilla art, what tips would you share from your own experiences?

Build a website for it. Or at the very least an Instagram. I've been working on a project about old signage in the San Francisco Bay Area for something like thirteen years now -- it's called The San Francisco Bay Area Ghost Sign Mapping Project.

It started as a Google Map where I'd map where all the signs were with photos and historical information and whatnot. And no one cared. It was like the project was invisible. But when I made a website, then people could find me online and use my project and they started to take me seriously. They'd ask me to give talks or make maps for museum exhibits and whatnot. If I had kept that project as just a Google Map or just a section on my larger portfolio page it would have gone nowhere.