Abundance and Scarcity was an investigation and meditation on food, the growing of food as a crop, the coming together around food at mealtimes, and our diverse cultural attitudes towards food. Food is one of our most intimate links to nature. Through it we are tied in dependency to the land and its seasons and to the whims of the weather. It is also one of our most universally understood ties to each other as people. Though most of us have never experienced it, hunger is also something we recognize and dread.

My grandmothers were women of the depression. In their own ways, each of them made a life's work and art out of feeding people. Remembering their creativity with food, both as cooks and as people who managed to get people fed, was one inspiration for this piece. Others were the fields of corn, corn cribs, granaries and haylofts I played in as a child in Pennsylvania. The physical joy of walking in the corn or through grain on a threshing floor was something I wanted to recreate. This piece, with its own grown crop, its granary and its paths marked by proverbs, called forth from viewers their own thoughts and memories about food and the land.

Abundance and Scarcity was a half acre corn field with "granary" and a copper clad meditation house with a grain floor. It also incorporated 35 copper stepping stones printed with sayings about food and hunger from cultures around the world, and other sculptural elements.