Raising children is an all-encompassing task requiring all aspects of a parent’s being: emotional, intellectual, spiritual and physical. Being a part of my children’s lives has led me to examine my own life and values. I have always held nature and spirituality in high regard but having children has strengthened and deepened this appreciation and connection. This work explores the subtle and ephemeral emotions found in the everyday experiences navigating and exploring the natural and spiritual world with children. I think of each of these photographs as a visual poem uncovering the wonder and beauty that surrounds us everyday.
Raising children is an all-encompassing task requiring all aspects of a parent’s being: emotional, intellectual, spiritual and physical. Being a part of my children’s lives has led me to examine my own life and values. I have always held nature and spirituality in high regard but having children has strengthened and deepened this appreciation and connection. This work explores the subtle and ephemeral emotions found in the everyday experiences navigating and exploring the natural and spiritual world with children. I think of each of these photographs as a visual poem uncovering the wonder and beauty that surrounds us everyday.
Every marriage has its seasons; seasons of growth, seasons of adversity, seasons of loss, seasons of renewal. This series explores the ever-changing emotional and psychological landscape of a marriage. The green walls of our bedroom provide the backdrop against which I illuminate the dreams, fears, frustrations and love my husband and I experience as we travel through time and in and out of the many seasons of our marriage together. Through this exploration I hope to reveal the beauty and complexity of sustaining intimacy in our constantly changing lives.
The family I was born into is an even split: three male and three female. The family I have created is not; it is 3 males and myself. As a female I have always been drawn to the female perspective and to women’s issues and I assumed that someday I would have a little girl that would in some form extend these explorations into the next generation. This was not to be. As I accept this reality I have begun to photograph my life with boys. Although I am not one for categorizing and stereotyping I do think the male and female perspectives are different and I am curious to see what this series says about a life with boys. For now this is a work in progress that I foresee continuing for many years to come.
Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord is a park in Duisburg, Germany designed to embrace and transform an industrial landscape into a regional park with play structures, climbing walls, walled gardens and walking paths. It is a landscape filled with history and endless adventure and discovery.
Orlando is a city best known for its fantasy and tourism. But here amidst a sea of the unreal and sprawling suburbia there is a quaint and beautiful downtown nestled beneath a canopy of live oaks. These oaks have lived through the settlement and growth of the city, through the Great Depression, through history. These regal trees project a sense of power and understanding. Their lives are measured in centuries and through the centuries much has happened beneath their limbs. In an age of constant migration, these trees stand in stark contrast to our flux. They embody a deep rooted sense of place; something that slips away when we are all transplants. But these oaks reach their limbs out beyond place and into the realm of the metaphysical. They are omniscient oaks; they have seen more than any human will ever see and in them there is a sense of deep wisdom and a connection to the divine.
A garden is our attempt to tame and cultivate the chaos of the natural world into a beautiful and ordered space. In this project the garden becomes an interplay of light and dark, of known and unknown; the language of poetry. Drawing from a Japanese aesthetic defined by simplicity and shadows these photographs create mysterious and abstracted tableaus of the landscape through its flora. Viewed in succession, these glimpses are the stepping-stones that invite us to take an enchanting walk through the Garden of Shadows.
Anima Mundi is a series of black and white images exploring the world of spirit and memory in everyday life. I created these photographs within a few miles of the places I called home over the course of a few transitory years. These images illustrate a world immersed in poetry, open to all willing to stop and listen.
In 2008 my husband and I relocated and I was forced to give up my darkroom. In search of a way to continue my hands on work with photography, I decided to pursue a process I had long been intrigued by- Polaroid transfers and emulsion lifts. The Polaroid sketchbook project is series of daily thoughts, meditations and vignettes. Like a sketchbook it provided a place to play and explore.
In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings and the resulting loss of a close friend, my husband and I went ahead with our plans to live in Dublin, Ireland for the summer. It was a summer of grief and strained communication between us. We spent many an evening walking silently together through Rathmines, our adopted neighborhood. The Irish seem to love walls and almost every property had a wall of some kind built around it. Emotionally, I was drawn to these walls and their many manifestations. With some distance from the intense grief of that summer I have come to see these walls as metaphors for the psychological walls we build around our fragile selves in a crisis. We instinctually build these protective walls and each of our walls has its own unique characteristics. My husband's wall was tall and impenetrable and so I spent the summer observing the many iterations of the wall and awaiting the time when the walls between us would return to a more intimate scale.
Orchids are admired for the exotic beauty and mystique of their living blooms, but the dead flowers fallen from a plant are afforded little value. For this series, I gathered a cast of the dead: dried, shriveled and wilting orchid flowers. In the darkroom, these dead orchids became my negatives. They revealed a beauty entirely separate from, and beyond the living flower. Each orchid had its own response to the wilting and drying process; some orchids shriveled into thick, spongy, vein filled petals while others dried into long spidery legs. As I worked in the dark creating these photograms, I felt as if I were unveiling the wondrous and beautiful afterlife of these fallen orchids.