(2016-2019)
ARTIST STATEMENT
Sparsely scattered throughout high altitude mountain ranges across the Western US, there exist stands of several-thousand-year-old Bristlecone Pines. One remote stand lives near me in the Colorado mountains. For more than 18 years I have visited these trees, as one would an ancient temple or sage, and I consider the myriad global changes through which they have stood. For me, they embody temporality and transcendence held in balance.
They prosper in some of this planet’s harshest environments. Rising from thin, arid soil along an 11,200-foot tree line, they endure fierce perpetual winds, withstand long periods of drought, and year-round temperatures hovering near to well-below freezing. I am awed by their beauty, and moved by their strength and resilience against time, wind, altitude…everything but us. These ancient trees, some alive since before the Roman Empire, are at last, dying. Their slow demise is due to climate change and the introduction of invasive species against which they have no defense. Although many may last another century or more, a process of decline has begun that makes me view them differently.
While struggling to convey how I view these trees, I happened upon a case of expired black and white Polaroid Type 665 film. Discontinued in 2007, the film was itself a vestige of a bygone era, and decades beyond its expiration date. The film’s imperfections and truncated tonal range, imposed by time and climate, created visually meaningful implications. Juxtaposed with the unique Bristlecone Pine forms, the resulting images underscore the steadfast value of the past, and a sense of unease as we move into a future where human endeavors supersede adopting a balanced place in the natural world.
Archival Pigment Prints on Watercolor Paper, from Drum Scanned Expired Polaroid Type 665 Negatives
Edition of 5 + 2 A/P; 16” x 20”
Edition of 3 + 1 A/P; 6.5” x 8”
Edition of 3; 40” x 50”
“…Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” -Annie Dillard
ARTIST STATEMENT:
I strive to understand the More-than-Human-World, and our place within it. Through an ongoing photographic journal, Traces, I document everyday encounters in nature, where I find even the simplest forms visibly manifest larger truths of existence. Among these things, I’m most drawn to intimate details of life and death that often go unnoticed, residual marks left by time and things unseen, and incidental beauty and irony that results from human intervention with the land. These and other natural phenomena are visual signs that can help us understand, adopt and maintain a balanced human place within the larger universe. Like Zen Kōans, interpreting them traces invisible threads that tie fallen leaves to the tree.
“…Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” -Annie Dillard
ARTIST STATEMENT:
I strive to understand the More-than-Human-World, and our place within it. Through an ongoing photographic journal, Traces, I document everyday encounters in nature, where I find even the simplest forms visibly manifest larger truths of existence. Among these things, I’m most drawn to intimate details of life and death that often go unnoticed, residual marks left by time and things unseen, and incidental beauty and irony that results from human intervention with the land. These and other natural phenomena are visual signs that can help us understand, adopt and maintain a balanced human place within the larger universe. Like Zen Kōans, interpreting them traces invisible threads that tie fallen leaves to the tree.
“…Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” -Annie Dillard
ARTIST STATEMENT
I strive to understand the More-than-Human-World, and our place within it. Through an ongoing photographic journal, Traces, I document everyday encounters in nature, where I find even the simplest forms visibly manifest larger truths of existence. Among these things, I’m most drawn to intimate details of life and death that often go unnoticed, residual marks left by time and things unseen, and incidental beauty and irony that results from human intervention with the land. These and other natural phenomena are visual signs that can help us understand, adopt and maintain a balanced human place within the larger universe. Like Zen Kōans, interpreting them traces invisible threads that tie fallen leaves to the tree.
PROCESS STATEMENT:
All images in Traces are digitally captured, processed and printed with archival pigment inks on fine art paper.
(2006-2015)
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a true child of the Eastern United States, spending my life outdoors in the Ohio Valley, Hocking Hills, Tennessee and the Blue Ridge Mountains. I always embraced this land, and for the same reasons Annie Dillard lived at Tinker Creek—profound intricacy and fecund beauty, soft green fields and rushing water, air thick with the sounds and scents of myriad forms of life, and mystery around each curved path. My mother was from Tennessee, and through summers spent there I developed a deep love and appreciation for both the land and culture of the southeastern mountains. In 1998, she and I road tripped throughout the Western US, and although I enjoyed visiting a foreign landscape, I returned home knowing the Blue Ridge was my true Place; I would never live in the West. So…
I met my husband in 2001, and we married in Asheville NC, where we lived just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. He took a job that moved us to Colorado’s Front Range in 2005. The landscape felt somehow masculine to me—harsh, hard-edged and desperately dry, its broad strokes and extremes a grand display, with no natural canopy to conceal human proliferation from the view. I felt (and still feel) completely out of place here, and I struggled to connect with the beauty I knew existed in this land. My spouse is now gone, and though I still live in the West, I am focused on returning to the Blue Ridge.
This body of work is a result of my seeking to be at home and at one with the American Western landscape.
PROCESS STATEMENT:
All images in out of a mountain of grass and thistle are digitally captured, processed and printed with archival pigment inks on fine art paper.
16” x 16” Edition 10 + 2 A/P
7” x 7” Edition 10 + 2 A/P
YASE: SEPTEMBER, from No Nature, by Gary Snyder
Old Mrs. Kawabata
cuts down the tall spike weeds—
more in two hours
than I can get done in a day.
out of a mountain
of grass and thistle
she saved five dusty stalks
of ragged wild blue flower
and put them in my kitchen
in a jar
(2010-2014)
Entropy: A natural condition of the physical universe wherein all things continuously move toward greater disorder.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I’ve spent my life immersed in nature, and making photographs to interpret its complex dialog. Through this I’ve become particularly attuned to the disparities between nature’s authentic self-expression, and the images we’ve grown to accept as accurate representations of it. We’re surrounded by these familiar and often cliché images—in magazines and on television, in calendars and postcards, as advertisements and décor. But unlike phenomenal experience, images offer only decontextualized fragments of information, manipulated and filtered by the photographer and the medium itself. My series Entropy overtly reveals this disparity.
After a catastrophic computer crash, I ran a recovery program which (mis)-interpreted my own digital landscape images. The corrupted files unearthed the landscapes’ digital building blocks, deconstructing them into visible components of content and process. As I examined the resulting images I was drawn to serendipitous interactions within them, and to the more substantive meanings they suggest. While parts of the images are immediately recognizable, being confronted with the photographic media interrupts any attempt at superficial reading. In viewing them we are encouraged to reflect upon photography’s role in cultivating commonly accepted ideas about nature, and to remain conscious of how those ideas influence our valuations and actions toward it.
Process Statement:
These images are culled from tens of thousands of corrupt files. To maintain the integrity of the computer’s interpretation, I have optimized their density and contrast but not altered image content or layered images.
(2010-Ongoing)
ARTIST STATEMENT
These images come from a visual meditation practice I keep whereby I use my camera without a lens, but instead hold other optics against the camera body, and look very closely at botanic subjects. This technique transforms the predictable way a camera sees, and I am completely transfixed as the slightest movement or breath changes the image dramatically. I become absorbed in the process of image-making, and in that I become absorbed in seeing.
The resulting images I am most drawn to reference spring, or any of the moments when a plant’s lifespan is on a cusp of change—shoots, buds, or new blooms. They balance openness and tension, like so many moments throughout our own lives.
The images also reference mindfulness, as they mimic the way our thoughts themselves move into and out of focus without our even knowing it. We try to hold onto moments and onto thoughts, but as everything is fleeting we can only retain slight echoes of information, with the rest constantly fading into and out of focus.
Editions of 10 + 2 A/P in sizes approximately:
12” x 18”
20” x 30”
40” x 60”
These images are inspired by the bright yellow color of new aspen leaves in early spring. Anyone who has lived among aspen knows this singular color that lasts only a short time, and the sound they create when rustling in a breeze.
These images are inspired by the quiet solitude of Italian lemon groves. Like Vincent van Gogh, I am inspired by way the color yellow reflects the warmth, and character and quality of light only seen in southern climates.
