thick velvet dark

A single poem woven through black and white photographs. Made while on an artist residency at the Sou'Wester Lodge in Seaview, Washington. A quiet time of reflection on my art practice and life's choices.

The Garden Shed

My desk sits at the top of the attic stairs. On my desk sits a baby monitor. My children are young and often call for me in the night. The night, when I have finished my daily responsibilities and slip away to work on photographs for an hour or so. Piecing time together in the cracks between other responsibilities. It’s often quiet, like tonight, the rain lulling everything, until I hear my youngest whine and squirm and I hold my breath waiting. I might go down the narrow stairs and stand outside his door for a minute. I might put a blanket on him, huddled as he is at the top of his bed beyond his pillow and against the wall.

I think of Rosalind Fox Solomon, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Imogen Cunningham, three artists I admire who made their work from garden sheds or other outbuildings out of the necessity in their lives to be close to home. I think of how I am metaphorically doing the same thing.

I write poetry in the middle of the night while I lay awake with my children. 3:30am is responsible for many poems. My creative mind active, I write my thoughts on my glowing smartphone notepad; one hand on the phone, one hand on my child, often one breast in my child’s mouth. I cherish these odd waking hours as time with my children and as time alone with my thoughts. My own garden shed, slightly cave-like.

This chapter contains photographs and poems from the first 6 years of my life as a mother.

On Libraries

In this work, On Libraries, I am exploring the present usage of community libraries, paying homage to their rich history and striving to see them as a vital part of the future.

The role of libraries is changing as technology becomes integral to our way of acquiring and distributing information. Where visits to the local library to look up statistics or find the latest novel used to be common, more and more we turn to the internet for information. We “Google” things until our eyes ache, we buy books on Amazon.com because it is easy and we don’t have to leave the house to do it. The savvy public library is making an attempt to keep up with this trend toward non-interpersonal interaction while struggling to keep its physical doors open. I have great respect for technology and the ways it has improved our lives. This work is not advocating a return to “the good old days”. Rather, it is a reminder to remember the good that exists even without the internet, the value in a building built just for reading and in a person standing in front of you.

The physical space of a library is important to a community. Often in the center of a neighborhood or town, it signals the importance of free access to knowledge for those who desire to obtain it. In my travels to various libraries I am consistently impressed by the spaces created for young, preliterate children. Special care is taken to instill an early love of reading with programs like story hour, something I remember vividly from my own childhood. This love of reading follows an individual throughout their life, bringing these same children back after school gets out, to a safe place, and again later in life to do research or read that book they don’t need to own.

I feel an urgent need to make these pictures, to share my love of the library before it becomes something I no longer recognize, and hopefully, to ignite a spark in a few readers who perhaps didn’t grow up with story hour. I worry about the future of the community library. Libraries are most endangered where they are needed most, in poor and impoverished neighborhoods. As one of six children I didn’t own my own books until I was old enough to have a job, and buy them for myself. This made access to a library especially important. The librarians in our town knew us all and would often recommend books for us to read. They made us feel that we were a part of something bigger than ourselves, a community.

Liminal Umbra

Photographs are at once literal and ambiguous; when made with a camera they are simply light reflected off an object onto a sensitized surface. For the reflection to exist the object must exist in space and time. However, no explanation comes with this moment taken out of context and out of life. I find this both liberating and frustrating. Reckoning with actual objects, places, and events to articulate our inner feelings, desires and truths can be problematic.

These images remove the camera from the equation allowing me a more internal view of reality. I am still using light to record shadow but it is in a more elemental and hand-made way. These images were all made on glass. Some I made with a candle's smoke, others were made for me by time and circumstance. By making abstractions and treating them like photographs I am able to explore the shadowy threshold between photography and drawing, light and dark, entropy and rebirth.

The Red Wheelbarrow

I witness life in dumbstruck amazement. My dog breathes out a heavy sigh in her sleep, a flickering sunspot dances across a wall, and I have to remind myself to breathe. What matters most in this life? Quiet, unmovable passions for another person, for a place, for a way of living every day. William Carlos Williams knows: so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens.

If I can come close to this kind of poetry in my photographs, speaking only of what I know, I will have succeeded. These photographs are neither document nor confession. They are things easily seen and easily forgotten, but I am convinced they are the moments that count, that will remind me why I love and why I make.

With Your Eyes Closed

Portraits make an implicit promise of knowledge or insight into another person. While they give almost infinite detail, they frustrate any deeper knowing and even subvert that knowing by showing a view of a person that is as straightforward and complex as anyone is in an encounter with a stranger.

These pictures of my family and friends with their eyes closed are an attempt to capture the uncapturable. This day is a lovely day, we will die on a day we haven’t yet met, and will say goodbye. So I click the shutter and pin my butterfly to a velvet-covered board.

For my viewers, beyond the question of appearance or personality, is the emotional impact of viewing a person with their eyes closed. Thoughts of sleep, meditation, trust, and death inevitably surface. The images are made outdoors, in natural light, as if for a moment the subject paused as the pace of the day slowed to a crawl allowing the capture of this tiny blink of an eye.