About
If I looked just beyond my father’s shoulder when he was sitting across the table from me, I could fall into the view of a mountain range, framed and hanging on the wall. I remember the purples and blues. His other photographs were around, too – storied landscapes whispering to skies, still water cradling cypress trees, lightning, a butterfly. Years after he passed away, my stepmother carefully copied each page of his poetry journal and gave it to me. Although he encouraged my early curiosity about photography and gave me my first camera, I was too young then to realize that he was an artist.
Both photography and writing have always been part of my own creative process. They’re continually in conversation, each inspiring the other. I think of a photograph and a poem very similarly and love how they each delicately conjure the tangible from the intangible – the shape of light, the shape of a word, and hopefully, the shape of a story.
The series Ghost Stepping began as a way to contemplate the legacy of my family history and it became the first chapter of an ongoing narrative about loss, memory, and the landscape. Each of the chapters that follow touch on different aspects of this narrative.
The series Let It Go reflects on generational trauma. It evolved from a poem that I wrote on the cusp of a series of difficult life transitions. The poem began playing over and over in my mind as a mantra and a balm, and the photographs emerged.
The series Take Care of Your Sister and the series Before the Trees both trace the contours of my family history through the landscape. Take Care of Your Sister meanders through memories of the Mississippi Delta where my father grew up and where my brother and I spent time with our grandparents when we were very young. Before the Trees traverses the fields and hills of Mississippi and Arkansas that harbor the memories and memorials of my brother and our loved ones.
More recently, I have been drawn to photograph the metaphysical undercurrents in our lives and in our histories, and to explore the spiritual and healing nature of contemplating our interconnectedness with everything.
The series Solace in the Stardust and the series Alchemy of the Stars are both meditations on the belief that we are all made of stardust and we are all inherently interconnected. In the way that we have looked to the stars for guidance throughout history, I began doing the same, but looking for the stars everywhere in the world around me, not just above me. Stars map physical geography, but they also hold the mysteries of spirituality, awe, and wonder. Looking outward to constellations in the night sky overlaps with looking inward to the constellations of our lives and our histories. In the series Alchemy of the Stars, tides push and pull stars across the ocean, reflecting the same internal patterns of stardust that ripple through our lives. Light becomes a portal between the cosmic and the earthly, resonating with the stardust that infuses everything in the Universe and glows with our interconnectedness. In this space where they meet, we mend and heal. I find solace in the tender bursts of stardust that dapple our lives, even in the darkest times.
