This is a difficult time of human anxiety and environmental destruction. Art can offer a means of engaging with these challenges. At their best, images can raise questions, evoke feeling and empower our imaginations. Chasing these possibilities is important to me, even if achieving them is rare.
My work centers on the natural world and our connections and disconnections within this web. My current practice zigzags between making photos for Alternative Technologies and drawings, prints and cyanotypes for Missing. Together these projects address urgent environmental issues, emphasizing both loss and hope.
The Alternative Technologies photos improvise options for energy and communication, since these are the essential challenges and opportunities of our era of climate crisis and digital revolution. I use a mix of foraged, scavenged and purpose-made materials to construct an ephemeral contraption and set it up on site to photograph. The questions that underlie my experiments include: What if communication technology connected us with nature? What messages could be sent? What are sources of power? What does energy look like? How can it be transmitted? Even though these devices don’t actually work, I hope that the images catch your attention. After all, paying attention is the first step to finding new possibilities.
The threat of extinction surrounds us, even though we can still mostly ignore this in our everyday lives. Researchers estimate that up to half of the species on earth could die off during this century--some say before 2050. Even species that survive suffer significant reductions. Scientists were stunned to discover that almost 3 billion birds have disappeared from North America in the last 50 years. These losses are a devastating prospect and depressing to even consider. In much of my work over the last decade I have tried to face this reality, albeit through small gestures and sideways looks. Missing is my current way of bearing witness and offering a visual eulogy. This project is a series of portraits: some focus on an individual animal, some convey what’s not there, trying to show the emptiness left behind by disappearance.
I’m grateful to have the chance to observe and draw, to scavenge and improvise, even if these inventions only work on paper. Making images is a powerful antidote to discouragement and despair.