HIMMELSLEITER STUDIES (2015): In many traditional cultures arborescent forms represent a conveyance that establishes a direct connection between heaven and earth. For this body of work I drew inspiration from The Ladder of Divine Ascent, a monastic manual written by a Christian ascetic cenobite known as John Climacus in the seventh century CE. After photographing numerous trees throughout Berlin, I selected thirty on which to base watercolors paralleling the thirty “rungs” of the monastic’s “heavenly ladder” (or Himmelsleiter in German, which also alludes to the dream of Jacob’s ladder as recounted in the Jewish Torah and the Christian Pentateuch).