Butter and Eggs

Somewhere along a Colorado roadside — the kind most drivers pass without slowing — toadflax pushes up through rocky soil and reaches for open sky. Laurie S. Waalkes has always noticed these plants. She was raised in the Rocky Mountains, and the humble, overlooked wildflowers of the high plains have been her companions since childhood. In this piece, she lifts three toadflax stems out of the ditch and places them somewhere they can finally be seen: a luminous ground of turquoise paint, old sheet music, blueprint fragments, and the printed words of someone writing earnestly about creativity. The plants stand taller here. They deserve to. The layers beneath the botanicals tell their own quiet stories. A bar of music marked 'Allegretto' — brisk and lively — hums under the left stem. Fragments of text speak of human effort and imagination. An architectural grid suggests the ordered world we build around ourselves, while a silhouetted bird tilts into the upper field as if it has just caught a thermal and lifted free. The burnt-orange landscape that pools at the base feels like Colorado mesa country, warm and ancient, holding everything up. This is what Laurie means when she calls her work a treasure hunt. The toadflax is the entry point, bright and welcoming, but the deeper you look, the more the piece becomes yours — a reflection of whatever you bring to it. That is the gift of a truly layered work: it never stops giving.