Yellow Dog Series

The Yellow Dog Series
If you are troubled by the Letters YELLOW DOG
Stenciled across the landscapes
Or the targets that focus the torn up abstracts
 Or comforted by the colors, signs and symbols of healing
 Or haunted by birds and dogs and fragments of the earth
 You should be.
My landscapes, abstracts and photography in the Yellow Dog series document my love for and impending loss of the Yellow Dog River northwest of Marquette in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
The Yellow Dog River is just a part of a vast amount of land that is endangered by our failure to protect valuable wilderness areas from damage that will last thousands of years.
I am just an artist - not a scientist, not a powerful industrialist, not a politician.  I don't have all the answers. 
I do know that sometimes the only thing I can do is stand up and say THIS IS WRONG.
 THIS IS WRONG.
Please enjoy the series.  It held a lot of comfort for me as I created the first art and it continues to call new additions each year as I work my way through my relationship with the Yellow Dog.
 Thank you,
Kathleen Mooney, ISEA
 For more information or to lend assistance please visit www.savethewildup.org
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The Yellow Dog -- by Kathleen Mooney
We stand at the intersection
Of the Earth and our lives
A thin veil of beauty and difficulty
Promise and Challenge
 
Tangled thickets and deep tumbling pools
Vast bogs and sinking ground
 
It is not easy here
Yet we each have found a connection
 
With the rarely glimpsed bird,
The flash of fin,
The white gleaming birch or
The distant yip and play
Of the waters of the Yellow Dog
 
There is a terrible power
And a gentle embrace
In this wilderness we could never create
 
It welcomes us for an hour, a day, a lifetime
And then turns snarling - barking - howling
All back hair raised and paws planted
Threatened by the two legged
Brigands, Thieves and Mercenaries
 
Unable to scent the difference between us and them
 
Soon they will rip the heart out
Cut it up in little pieces
Crate it up
And mark the containers
YELLOW DOG
All misspelled and jumbled letters
Sending it off to the hoppers of industry
 
And a part of our souls will be lost to us forever