When I Am Here, I Yearn for There
I move between remembered landscapes. The upper Midwest, where I was born, is wide blue and green, with clear light and few shadows, mostly from passing clouds. This world is aware of the sky, air, and especially the spare, unbroken horizon. My other, now familiar landscape is my adopted home, New England. Here the land enfolds and encloses, with changeable light, pale, then warm, hard, then soft. Form draws attention, rather than space: the twist of a tree trunk or a shadow stippled on a rock. Colors are nuanced: the undulating greys of tree bark, moss green, fern, laurel.
These two landscapes converge and blur in this series of composite images. Hidden among the differences are commonalities. They linger on the edges, in the natural world’s liminal zones. A sentinel tree marks a New England field; like a solitary cottonwood punctuates the prairie sky with an exclamation point. Beachgrass grasps the sand and holds back the sea; at a kindred margin, cattail slows the prairie wetland's water and makes room for life.
These echoes are (in the romantic or pictorial sense) as much about my inner as my outer experience. When I am here, I yearn for there -- my childhood lakes and grasslands. And I am quite sure that if I return, I will do the same for here -- nostalgic for the New England mountains, the woods, and sea.
A thank you to my gifted and inspiring classmates and colleagues in Atelier 38 for their generous support. And a heartfelt thank you to our teacher and fearless leader, Emily Belz at the Griffin Museum of Photography, for the opportunity to learn, grow and exhibit this new work.