Studio Reflection - March 2024

Spring, Residency, and Erosion.

We’ve crossed the threshold of spring, and already life seems to feel fuller with the sense of possibility. I really struggled through the last parts of winter, even with winter having been relatively short and mild. I sound like a broken record when I say that my body is the lens through which I see the world, and this year in particular my body was not patient with winter.

March has been a whirlwind. Despite my best efforts to be mindful about my schedule, which often fills to overflowing, I spent the first half of the month juggling extra shifts at my care job while preparing to leave for the artist residency I am currently in at the Goodall Center at Wofford College in Glendale, SC. I am so grateful for the experience I’ve had here so far, and can’t believe how quickly time can go.

I’m also preparing to lead another practice group, Pushing the Edges - Noticing Symbiosis this April, which I am excited about (there are a few spaces left!). I learned a lot from leading A Complex Definition of a Body from January to February, and will be applying a lot of the concepts from that practice group within this one, which will encourage us to play in murky edges, from reimagining frames of perspective (what does a body look like to a microorganism?), to exploring how shifting our perspective can change our photography, and vice versa.

Returning to Glendale, I’ve been thinking deeply about the idea of erosion, both as a natural force, but also erosion of perspective, systemic structures, and memory. I’m playing around with lumens that feature images in states of erosion, and making photographs that explore the present through the senses, while also calling attention to the past and leaving space for the future. The shoals that I have been working on are millions of years old rock slowly revealed by water, and there is a palpable stillness that emanates from beneath the rushing water. 

At the same time, construction noise is audible upon the shoals, a looming potential future drifting at the speed of sound over the creek. I am at my core a pragmatic optimist (I am a Sagittarius after all) and have learned throughout my own personal life challenges that hope is a commitment, but it can be difficult to remain optimistic about climate change and attitudes about the environment and development in a world such as ours, that moves so quickly and so ravenously.

So, while I set out to create a meditation on erosion, I find myself, as I often do, creating a project about grief. I’ve been sinking into slowness as a way to connect intimately with the entanglement of grief and hope, a recognition of lost pasts, but also pasts that should be left behind, a recognition of a tenuous present, and a hope for a more integrated future.