My work begins with the question: What if a medium with an inherently abstracted relationship to time – a medium that requires a mechanism between the artist and subject – can become more embodied and experiential? What if photography could reflect states of interactive being? Considering ways in which photography can reshape its plasticity into experiential forms, I utilize weaving as a metaphor for collaboration and states of interactive being within the body and landscape.
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Ecologist Suzanne Simard helps us reconceptualize how we live in relation not just to each other, but to the living Earth as a whole. She has shown that underground mycorrhizal networks in forests allow communication between trees and plants. Simard speculates that trees sense the presence of people. The Earth’s soils are knit into contiguous living networks – rhizomatic in a Deleuzian sense – all connected, going on indefinitely in all directions. Plato’s societal fabric meets a material reality with plants’ underground connectivity, their networks interacting and affecting one another in response to human and other outside activity.
These phenomenological exchanges with a shared living world inform the range of my work as I seek to make things that represent collaborative exchange with an environment.
What interests me about a camera is that it is literally a meeting place between an inner and outer world– the place where mental and physical states are woven together.
Photography, with its [camera] body and reflective mirror, has a relationship to embodied perception built into its very material, but photography as a discipline is still figuring out how to deal with the body and its experiences.
In addition to studying how photographic space might be reshaped to become experiential, I want to express the sensuality of being alive and in relation to the world. Studying how the biological, neurological and psychological dimensions in the body meet the shifting outside world and its multiplicity, reveals human malleability as we shape and reshape ourselves in relation to our environments and vice versa.
Plants and trees make ideal subjects for me; it is important that my subjects exist in the dual space of materiality and immateriality, so that our encounter is between two, living, breathing, illuminated beings coming into contact and attempting to make relationship.