Studio Reflection - March 2025

Transition, uncertainty, growth.

What has sustained you this month?

My muscles ache from the garden, calluses sore from working gloveless, blood splattered on my jeans from a split thumb that refuses to close fully. I’m digging out the edges of a small plot, something large enough to hold the big dreams I have, something small enough to still be realistic. What else can I do in these times?

There was a wildfire near my house a few days ago, a few miles away, a few ridgelines over. It was contained without loss of human life or structure, but it was the second time in my life that I’ve packed a go-bag (the first being for hurricane Irma in 2017), the first time I’ve truly experienced the unpredictable fear of fire. My county, as well as many others in the region, has been placed in a state of emergency 6 months to the day (as of yesterday) from Hurricane Helene.

In Western North Carolina, as in so many places, climate change has shifted from an abstract concept to a lived reality. I drive to work and pass an ochre wound in the mountain, the remnants of a landslide that continues to break open, periodically spilling soil onto the shoulder of the road. Trees lean precariously against each other, toppling during the frequent high wind days. And now fires that have surpassed the expected for fire season.

How do we hold these times, as creative people, as sensitive people? The world is on fire, literally and figuratively. Yet, I woke up to birdsong this morning, to the gentle golden light glowing outside the window, my cat Edgar pawing me gently in the face. All is well, and all is wrong, and all is well. I go to my disability support job, share fliers about a protest my friend is organizing against Medicaid cuts, and dig in the garden. I try to contribute to building caring community, make photographs, and listen to a friend vent on the phone.

I began this month forcing myself to take photographs. This winter has felt long, despite it being shorter than many other winters I’ve lived through. I needed something from photography, a way back to my body during a dissociative episode, a tether to the world around me. I started making self portraits, letting them be what they were without expectation, asking the ritual of looking and sitting to help me find a way back to my body while my nervous system reeled.

I’m not wholly satisfied with these photographs, other than with the fact that they exist. I was able to project my third person perspective onto the camera and recognize my body through photographs. They weren’t a magic spell of healing, but the process of making helped remind me that no state of mind is permanent, that even slight shifts in experience can be profound.

This fluidity of being is something I have tried to cultivate trust in, both personally and creatively. I spoke last month about being dissatisfied with the images I was making and how I’ve learned to understand my discontent with my images within the context of growth. I’m still not quite excited about the images I made this month, but I am back to reaching for the camera reflexively, after intentionally flexing my photographic muscles for a few weeks.

From left to right: A horse that remembered me from the year before, a young spikehorn felled by coyote, a portrait of my first car which finally quit running.

The Spring Equinox has undoubtedly influenced this. Within a few days of slightly warmer weather, the blooming of forsythia and peach trees, and being able to sit outside without feeling unbearably uncomfortable, I feel more myself than I have in months.

I also emphasized play this month in a way that is slowly becoming more natural to a nervous system used to running at high levels of stress. I took several days towards the end of the month to unplug, reconnect with my partner and friends, and tend to my sense of well-being with good food and rest.

During this period of rest was the awards reception for Making Kin: Belonging and Longing in Appalachia, which I participated in jurying this year alongside Susan Patrice as a member of Kinship Photography Collective. The show is a tender look at Appalachia, sharing diverse perspectives and nuanced experiences of these mountains. I’m looking forward to being back next week at the Tuchin Center to participate in an artist panel with Susan as well as participating artist, Marcus Morris.

In conjunction with this exhibition, I am also excited to have had work included in the Appalachian Journal. Being included as an artist in a Regional Studies Review of Appalachia feels unbelievable in some ways to me. There is a fantastic array of artists in this publication, and I’m grateful to be included.

In this season of transition, Kinship has also been undergoing a massive transition into our next call. I was able to spend time with the submissions we received from our Between Bodies call and curated a community celebration, now available on our website. This community is incredible, both with how work is executed, but also how vulnerable and honest everyone is. I encourage you to engage with the website and these artists.

After a lovely community celebration that imagined the exhibition as a slideshow, we introduced our new call, Elementals. Drawing on the Elementals book series from The Center for Humans & Nature, we will be diving into the elements over the next year and inviting deep reflection on our elemental hummanness. A huge thanks to Lyn Swett Miller, Chris Warner-Carey, Kaye Savage, Sarah Barker, and Susan Patrice for all of their incredible work on this call! Collaborating as a part of the call-for-engagement team has been inspiring and I’m excited to see where the year takes us. (Make sure to sign up for the Kinship newsletter to come along on this journey)

This studio reflection is a bit shorter this month. I’ve been wrestling with it over the past week and am coming to the realization that my mind is calling me to rest and reflect more deeply on what this month has brought me. I’m excited to have time to write the essays I wanted to this month and share one of them in April. I am wishing you much care over the month ahead.