This exhibition is framed through the lens of spending the past fall, winter, and spring in the hamlet of Les Tapies, perched on a promontory overlooking the Eyrieux River Valley in the Ardèche Mountains. As much as was possible, I immersed myself in the hamlet's history, its stories, its cultural context, (a great deal of that being the influence of the Protestant Huguenots who settled throughout the hills of the Ardèche in the 17th century), and its “objects”, from handmade farming tools to hymn books and school textbooks, diaries, and documents of every kind, many handwritten, going back to the 1750s…absorbing all of this, as well as a sense of  genius loci (spirit of place), and attempting to get a grasp of what this environment might have meant to all those generations of Ardèchois now buried in the family cemetery just up the hill. Some family members left the hamlet and almost everything behind during the time of the great exodus from the French countryside, which continued to some extent until the mid-twentieth century. All of this, I've attempted to “process” and then respond to through the medium of collage, assemblage, and abstraction, my guiding light, being Joseph Cornell…the small sculptural assemblages are integral to the presentation, as they resonate with the physical reality of this rural environment, where everything was touched and used with one’s hands, having both practical and aesthetic value for those who lived here in this rugged, difficult, but very beautiful place.