Chiral Haven

I’m so excited to share this book out in the world. I completed Chiral Haven at the beginning of this year in collaboration with Erik Mace, Kristen Bartley, and Olga Ginzburg as a part of Ramble Editions, and it was truly a joy to develop this project alongside those three artists. The encouragement to play and experiment brought me to a new place in my practice that I am sure will be feeding my work in the future.

Chiral Haven weaves together northern and southern Appalachia into a third realm that exists as a state of mind accessed through the ritual of photowalks.This body of work pulls from childhood memories and subjects of rumination that surfaced through the meditative process of walking the same roads over and over, and exists as a reflection on grief and change.

Inspired by being intimately tied to two geographical locations connected by a single mountain range, one being a place of origin, the other being a chosen home, the images invite the viewer to examine the near symmetry of two places 800 miles apart.

I grew up in rural New York in Otsego County, which is considered one of the northernmost counties that falls within Appalachia. I have a lot of complicated feelings about my hometown (or hometowns, as a singular community spanned multiple towns), and this project allowed me to really examine how, in many ways, I moved to a place that is not that different from my hometown, yet my feelings about living here in western North Carolina are vastly different.

It is hard to tell in the book what photographs were made where unless one has a very intimate connection with the two places I am referencing, and I wanted to create a portal into a state of mind that I visit through the ritual of walking with my camera. Walking has been a constant in my life, from long 3 mile walks with my mom after school during New York summers, to the walks that I try to take daily here in North Carolina. It is a coping mechanism; silent meditation is difficult for me, yet through walking, I enter a meditative state.

I was struggling with the process for this book for a long time. I was making a lot of images-I believe I edited down from 70+ images to the book selection, and I knew they fit together, but I couldn’t quite figure out what the connective tissue of the project was. On a whim, I read Faith, Hope, and Carnage by Sean O’Hagan and Nick Cave, and I realized that so much of this work that I was making was about a state of grief, about the way that grief changed my world perspective, and the almost surreal edge to my emotions as I moved between spaces.

After reading that book, I penned a piece which ultimately became the piece I am performing in the flipthrough video of the book. The act of writing helped the sequence, gave a narrative to the work, and ultimately helped me tie it together. I’ve become so interested in the idea of performing spoken word alongside having an audience engage with a photobook, and I am going to be exploring that more for future projects.

The form of the book was also a part of this project that encouraged a lot of growth around the craft of photography. I love bookmaking, though I rarely make books due to cost, so it was a real treat to work with Erik Mace in his studio to print Chiral Haven and think through some of the foldouts. I wanted this book to be something that the viewer could participate in, something where their attention would change the experience of the book. Also, who doesn’t love a foldout?

Chiral Haven was a special project to produce, and reminded me of the deep rooted “why” of my art practice. I process the world through asking questions and exploring relationships, and I’m so grateful to Ramble Editions for inviting me to participate in a round of collaborative bookmaking.

Chiral Haven Essay:

I am a body in perpetual motion, a body held together by fragile tension and sustained by continuous momentum. I contain an unfolding urge to keep moving, whether out of avoidance, or an impending sense of utter annihilation and dissolution into chaos.

Walking reminds me of the edges of myself, the strain of muscle against skin against cloth against air. I am engaged in a looping destination, a journey to and from performed with ritualistic reverence. Grief becomes a place I visit rather than an origin as I haul myself up and down hills, the same never weary path followed almost every morning and night. Wonder is a powerful tool of self preservation, a magic spell that renders the world into a chiral realm unlike the sharpness of the ordinary.

I paradoxically contain a primal fear of leaving and remaining. Everything feels fragile upon a hill. My sense of self shudders in the ever present whipping wind that always threatens to shove me from my feet. Not quite here, never there, caught in-between.

I believed fiercely in magic as a child, escaped into fairytales and the way that dew contained sunshine on summer mornings. A memory: a proud buck peers at my mother and I from the treeline of my childhood home, antlers trailing summer flowers. 

Sometimes, I remember the magic before the rending.

The tearing was not one event or another, but a culmination of wounds. I step into a thistle patch, nurse the infected puncture, pry the thorn from calloused flesh, keep walking.

Here is magic: the last ray of sunlight in a late autumn twilight, misty mountains dripping dawn between storm clouds, the rich press of southern summer against bare skin, the exhalation of trees whispering above my head. 

There is awe: the escape of a dream into late summer mornings, a world holding its breath in early winter; the dancing prism of ice crystals in sun beams; the silence of midwinter broken by singing wind shattering wood against the grain.

I am reverent to elders beyond flesh and bone, sentinels witness to season after season. What is a lifetime but a blink of an eye? In a thousand years have I been here at all?

The mountains hold my often uncertain self within reassurance, their presence grounding in their grandeur. Rootedness requires a safe ground in which to be sown; I grew up with shards of limestone in my feet, ghosts seeping from underlands and dancing in the cornfields. Here I see my blood in the soil, my saliva in the creek, a thousand refractions reflecting myself as unbounded by expectation, an invitation to be a being of flesh and bone and something like spirit. I lick my scars by starlight, the Milky Way a cosmic wound bleeding stars above my head as I find a rapturous, feverish, impossible grief that renders the world with a cutting clarity, an intensity dancing on the edges of it all.

Here holds a vibrancy that holds familiarity to the flame of novelty and ignites a powerful nostalgia for a place that exists in idle daydream, a story that was perhaps only a story told by other stories.

I text my father “you’d love turkey season here,” and I’m asking him to hold death with me. I’m saying I miss you, come visit.

Deer runs are felt as much as noticed, a near imperceptible ripple like a parted tide in a grassy sea. Northern deer sustained our table for many winters when nothing else could be bought, a debt I’m unable to repay except through quiet reverence. Here, their diminished size renders deer ever youthful. Spotted hides are calendars; fall is approaching.

The cows are lean in wintertime, wraith thin hip bones jutting out past barrel ribs. Calving season is an alarm clock, 6am labor while the sun crests the hill. I know farms tangentially, always in farmland, never on a farm. Hot breath gives up steam that lingers with the frost. I crave curling my fingers into ragged hair, a face pressed against fevered, heaving skin.

My grandmother tells me of October snowfall and the wasp nest that survived the windstorm like a wish suspended between us. I miss you, come visit.

The rhythm of walking is cyclical, a ritual, a miracle of anatomy, an ill evolved curvature in the spine. My mind cleaves to flesh away from thought as blood vessels pound and a million cells do a million things along the quiet winding way.

I am a body in perpetual motion upon a road, always returning.