It’s been a long time since I’ve shared any new work. Too long. It’s not that I haven’t made anything new: I made art and put it in boxes in the basement… which made me feel like I hadn’t made anything… and yet… when I photographed the new work I’ve made and really looked at it, I came to see that I’ve done more than I thought, and that my work has taken on new directions in relation to landscape as metaphor without my fully realizing it.
My photographic work has long used visual metaphor to investigate internal identity through a relationship (visual and symbolic) with a sense of place. My newer projects use photographs less in isolation, and more commonly in book form, with text (hence the vast expansion of the Book Arts part of the website). It engages more directly with specific locations and natural phenomena, creating explicit parallels between internal and external landscapes. It emphasizes the interconnectedness of internal and external experiences, of our most intimate emotions and our experiences in unfamiliar lands and geographies.
These images and books were created in response to specific experiences of place: in the Alaskan wilderness, on a glacier, in the Utah desert, in Newfoundland, looking out at icebergs off the coast… or even at home, looking closely at tree roots that have been pulled up in the backyard.
I have come to increasingly believe that close observation of the landscape helps us know ourselves, helps us understand what it means to be human in the world, in this world, a place that is both internal and external, familiar and unfamiliar, identifiable and unknowable, and, in the end, is all we have and all we are.
(You can see and read about these projects in greater detail in the new Book Arts section of the site: look for “A Field Guide to Internal Icebergs”, “Glacier Preservation Kit”, “Postcards from Mars”, “A Pocket Guide to Alaskan Wildlife”, and “Tell Me”.)