Bouncing around my head lately are questions and thoughts about how to describe the work that I’ve made, and have yet to make – that I want to make. While I’ve done exercises inside workshops and mentorships several times to figure this out, there’s always been a sense of looking to someone else to tell me about my work, rather than fully engaging with it on my own.
What I know is that at the heart of my work is a need to feel alive, to understand what it means to be human and centered in my body, which is the place from which I feel connected to everything else. Self-discovery is another way of saying this. Embodiment belongs here too. Just under that is a sense of wanting to be with nature, which is a curious word. There are so many kinds of nature – our human nature, our true nature, but then there’s also the nature that I can see outside my window, that is a part of the earth.
I get this feeling so often that we’ve, as a species, created systems and a human-centric reality that tries to pull us away from nature – all of the kinds – at every turn, that tries to divorce us from the rest of the animals on the planet by convincing us we are superior, and I don’t want to forget that I am part of a natural world that has a unique wisdom and language of its own. I grieve for the ways we’ve already started to lose it. And maybe that’s why I need to find a way to hold on to it for as long as I can. Cameras make it last, if not forever, for at least as long as we can look at the images.
The challenge is figuring out what my visual language is that makes a photo feel alive. This is a paradox, because a photo is still, it is in the past, and it is inanimate – all things that feel the opposite of aliveness. But for one moment, the camera and I saw something that was alive, and for some reason, my body wants reassurance of that feeling.
It wants to remember the abundance and life force of flowers in bloom.
It wants to feel the joy of seeing colors, in the contrast of broad daylight and the golden hues of sunset.
It wants to feel the water flowing against my skin, the air whispering around me as I move through it.
It wants to bask in the warmth from the sun, the light that is vital to life.
It wants to hold on to the giggles and the belly laughs, the silliness and humor.
It wants to feel like touching magic, by using bright colors, movement, motion blur, double exposures, shapes, and glowing light. It wants to see people, pets, plants, and places overflowing with life.
I want to let the photos show all of this, however imperfectly, blurrily, earnestly, because those are all literal and metaphorical parts of my gaze. (Ben joked that cacti will be the sharpest thing about my photos, and he isn’t wrong.) I need this work to remind me that I’m free, that I’m still a little bit wild, that I don’t have to live within the strict confines of the rules and the supposed tos and the shoulds that I grew up with.
What feels like the way forward is playing with all of the parts of making art that are connected to the real, offline world. Leaning into shooting on film, printing on paper (and using recycled or renewable materials when possible), and finding ways to share the work in real life, not just on the internet, all feel aligned to this. I’m even thinking about building a tiny art gallery (like a little free library, but for art) to put in my front yard, so that anyone who walks through our street can have a moment of art in their day.
May we all find ways of touching and experiencing what feels alive, and noticing what we want to move toward, or savor from a place of appreciation and gratitude.