Much is lost in the act of remembering. Exploring personal photographic archives, I reclaim the sense of wonder and curiosity experienced in my youth, while idling along the shores of our family lake home or discovering new terrain. In this series, I have re-photographed Kodachrome slides and invited light, environmental intrusions and focal plane manipulations to transform the images. There is a forlornness to this process as I acknowledge that recollection is tinged with the perspective of loss and eroded by the element of time.
Courtesy of Black + White Photography Magazine (UK)
As my daughters move on, I wrestle with the loss of their physical presence in my life. It’s as if we have traded places; they’re looking forward and I’m looking back.
In this work I reflect on generations past, tracing the memory of my maternal lineage through familial artifacts and apparel. I contemplate my connection to the cycles of nature. While navigating this passage, these images emerged as an expression of the invisible bonds that endure.
“Upon hearing one [a Haiku] the mind experiences a small sensation of space – which is nothing less than god.” ~ Allen Ginsberg, (from Natalie Goldberg’s Three Simple Lines)
In a time marked by a mighty pandemic and countless natural and man-made disasters, I seek meditative space within the day-to-day rhythms of nature. As my world draws smaller, time manifests a slower pace and I attune to quiet moments flowing by.
I have lived near water my whole life. It connects me to my earliest memories beside mid-western lakes surrounded by generations of family.
Now, relocated on the Pacific coast, I remain captivated by the advance and retreat of marine layer fog and the transient boundaries that reveal themselves at the water’s edge. I make photographs in this liminal space where the past, present, and future converge within the quiet of the landscape.
Memory is unreliable. We remember some events and not others. We recount the details of the past through our present experience, often recasting what happened to suit the story we would like to tell. I am interested in how photographs influence our recollection. In this series, I experiment with printing on fabric, reconstructing, and re-photographing images. Much like my own memory, each derivative reproduction fades, transforms and altars the original.
I spent most mornings with my father during the last months of his life, immersed in a heightened sense of joy and sorrow. In the afternoons, I would dispatch to the shores of Lake Michigan where I was drawn to the movements of water and cloud formations in ever-shifting light. Sometimes I intervened, conspiring with nature. Mostly, I stood witness to the certainty of the infinite horizon. The sequential routine of making long exposures slowed my pace and magnified the perception that I was keeping time.
Lake Michigan blue sits at the pastel confluence of green, grey and cyan on the nearby shoreline. In truth, the color of the lake is as transitory as Chicago weather. The shade of blue is widely determined by the reflection of the sky above and the organic material and sediment carried below.
I recently learned that invasive mussel species have slowly transformed the lake from green to bluer over the past two decades. I often return to the water’s edge to document the color of a given day.
