Recent work, 2020-2024
Recent work, 2020-2024
In the last two years alone we have witnessed unprecedented catastrophic climate emergencies, mass migrations, pandemics - each pivotal enough to portend apocalyptic changes on a global scale. These images reflect an overarching concern with the uncertainties of our sustainability and an awareness of the mutability and interconnectedness of all things. As my body of work matures I’ve come to view it increasingly as an ongoing engagement with our own impermanence and nature’s indifferent continuity.
Vestiges. Every time I come across them I am ferried into an imaginary realm of former lives. I'm drawn to these things, a life long obsession. I have always had a physical need to manually sift through the ground for that which was lost, cast aside, interred. Invariably, I spend a long time with the exhumed objects and their place of origin, often returning multiply over time. These objects are not inanimate, they are inhabited. They take hold of me.
The images are a meditation on attachment and impermanence. I don't see the subjects as disintegrated, rather as complete or still completing themselves. There is an at oneness, an atonement steeped in mystery, a harmony in the reclamation. Entropy has a structure. And that is what I try to photograph.
This work emerged during a kind of walking meditation on the Medomak River, looking for locations for large format work, but the muted winter color, the transformation of water into ice and the fog of thaws drew me in a new direction. My pocket Lumix camera allows access to difficult, often precarious places in challenging weather and leaves two hands for balance and traction. The underpinnings, the bones of the landscape, the underlying larger topography are further revealed in winter which presents a dimension of intrinsic abstraction. Cumulative physical encounters culminate in an image which is not so much a view but rather an experience, a record of the collective memory of the place frequented.
These intimate landscapes mirror my pre-occupation with the natural world. I am galvanized by the planetary crisis and the certainty that the felt energies of the visible world are palpably threatened by the exigencies of unprecedented temperatures, floods, drought, pestilence, famine and inevitably, wars. Thoreau believed that people need to feel the actions and forces of nature at work upon them, to witness their limits transgressed. Now we are the transgressors, having altered the patterns of those very forces. We must attend to the mystery, beauty, and fragility of what remains.
...and s/he cried with a loud voice: Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees - (Revelation)
Sparked by the swift assault on environmental protections, the silencing of knowledge, and the mockery of truth that ensued in the wake of the recent change in administration, these pictures burst forth - within a brief time, about three weeks in March. They embody the artist's dread of the end of the known natural world and question our place in that diminishing terrain.
Not long after we moved to Waldoboro, an old farm across the hill was sold. It had belonged to members of the Winchenbach family for generations. The new owners generously allowed me to photograph interior walls as they were being demolished, revealing more than a century of wallpaper, bible pages, and shipping news. Broken and mended objects in the burn pile spoke of lives of thrift, of making do, of hardship and earned rewards. These pictures are a testament to those lives.
