Acrylic Plexiglass and Polyester Dimensional Photograph, 10" x 10" x 10". 2016.
Private collection.
10" x 10" x 10" Acrylic plexiglass and polyester dimensional photograph.
Acrylic Plexiglass and Polyester dimensional photograph. 17" x 22" x 5". 2016
SOLD
Acrylic Plexiglass and Polyester Dimensional Photograph, 11" x 17" x 5". 2016
Acrylic Plexiglass and Polyester Dimensional Photograph, 11" x 17" x 5". Base available. 2016.
SOLD
Acrylic and Polyester dimensional photograph. 8" x 10" x 4" 2016
SOLD
Acrylic Plexiglass and Polyester dimensional photograph. 10" x 10" x 10". 2016
SOLD
Acrylic Plexiglass and Polyester dimensional photograph. 8" x 10" 4", 2016.
SOLD
Acrylic Plexiglass and Polyester Dimensional Photograph. 11" x 17" x 5". 2016.
UNAVAILABLE
Acrylic Plexiglass and Polyester Dimensional Photograph. 11" x 17" x 5". 2015.
SOLD
Last year I made Sigrid this dress out of two napkins and some thrift shop lace. And that sort of sums up an adult lens on childhood: that time in your life when you could wear table linens and be cute. But when I became a mother, I inherited another sense. My mom called it her Mother Vision, an eye that saw the innocence and the external menace of all the world and its beauty and danger entwined. Nowadays my mother herself is fragile. Today we went on a drive, our way of getting away together to spend time now that she can't walk well, and we talked and looked at beautiful places, and Sigrid sang to herself in the back seat of her car, wearing table linens and being cute, while I found myself in the passenger seat, responsible and small.
Sigrid and Iona were dressing up as ghosts, trying to scare Pascal and I as we lay huddled on my bed. Iona wore layers and layers of white tulle over her trusty old pillowcase ghost costume that she wears every year for Halloween. Beneath the tulle she tucked a bright pink silk scarf, meant to look like "guts" (do ghosts have guts?) and I have to admit that the undertones were actually kind of an effective layer of mystery, enough to almost creep her big brother out.
These images are a little bit like Iona in her ghost costume. I add layers of the same image, and then tuck a little something underneath the surface of all that translucent atmosphere, with the hope, if not to creep you, to give that sense of mystery that our strange, unreliable memories hold in common.
Image: my niece Iva running in a field she's never been to.
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Pascal had a little fever for two days, and was listening to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix all day. He wants to be a wizard. I was scrolling through my photos this evening, searching for inspiration among them, when I saw a set of images I hadn't seen in years: Pascal, about to start kindergarten, wearing a pirate's tri-cornered hat my mother had fashioned out of a newspaper, carrying his fishing net, and strolling confidently out onto the dock at a rented cottage on Silver Lake. Though I haven't been using the kids as subjects as much these says, I knew I had to show this fading memory, this kind of ghost time I had forgotten, and bring it into the present moment. Maybe he isn't a wizard, but I think there's an Age Line charm here somewhere.
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I can't remember when Iona took her first steps. It seemed like for the first six months of her life all she did was cry. It was hard. Probably when she took those steps it was beautiful. Did she walk to me? Were we at home? The mama guilt! And there was more mama guilt because we so frequently butted heads. We are both determined, independent people. We want to do it ourselves. But it's hard when the three year old insists on buckling the car seat herself, when her fingers are not strong enough. It tries the patience. It makes us late. But also from the beginning, she has been a funny girl. She learned to cross her eyes around 18 months, and she would do it when I was trying to scold her, and I would just laugh instead. Last January Iona got so sick. In one night, she was brought to three emergency rooms, finally by ambulance to Boston Children's for testing. There was a space of a few hours where I thought I was losing her. Like, really losing her. It turned out to be ok, and not what they feared, and we came home exhausted but grateful, so grateful was I for the continued chance to be her mom. When I rediscovered this set of photos from a trip to Castle Hill, staring across the Great Lawn and then whirling to face me with that fizzy smile, I am so in love with her, and so thankful that though I forget the first steps, I'll be able to watch her next ones.
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The eye is a circle, and the camera is the one-eyed liar, or so I was told by my painting professor in college, because it takes the information we gather from a pair of eyes, and meshes it through mirrors and light in a single lens. For years this prejudiced me against photography, though I am sure that wasn't his intent. But there's another take on it, which is that of a storyteller, or in the words of Tim O'Brien, "something truer than the truth." Getting to a connection from a passing source, such as the Essex house in the fog, shot in double exposure, the information of two lenses to show you what I see.
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If you've ever been out to Plum Island over land, then you've probably noticed The Pink House. Set off of the road, it's been abandoned for years and years, and it sings a siren song to those like me who pass it: "Abandon everything else and come live in me." It also reminds me of that Tom Waits song The House Where Nobody Lives that says, "if you find someone, someone to have, someone to hold, don't trade it for silver, don't trade it for gold. I have all of life's pleasures, and they're fine and they're good. They remind me that houses are just made of wood. What makes a house grand, it ain't the roof or the door. If there's love in a house, it's a palace for sure. But without love, it ain't nothing but a house, a house where nobody lives."
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This house. This house is another of my muses. Sitting right in the marsh, it is both on the edge of the wild and the edge of the road. It sees both of these realities at all times, and holds them both in its gray eyes. It isn't grand or put-together. It's exactly how I want to be when I, too, am old.
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You know when you're little and your parents are mad at you, and they say they hope some day you'll have a kid who's just like you? Well, Pascal is our sentimental child, and we are repainting his room top to bottom, so every last shred of his stuff had to come out of his room. This child is sentimental about the circuit boards from our old dishwasher. He approached me the other day with something for his "box," where I keep his precious items. It was "the first book I ever sewed." Last weekend I was in NH with my parents, and my dad approached me as I was folding laundry in the basement. "Do you think," he began sheepishly, "you could some day go through things in your old closets? I have nowhere to put my winter coat." I went through my old closet, where I had kept my E.T. Doll and my dance costume from second grade, my now decayed corsages and love letters from boyfriends made at sleepaway camp when I was twelve. All of this had been saved for my children, so they'd know the real me, and I was now watching my own child create the narrative of himself through the detritus of his past. I had to conclude, as I searched for available surfaces to put his scab collection (just kidding) that it had happened. I had a child just like me.
Image: Pascal and cousins at among the cliffs and chasms by the ocean at Montaña de Oro in Los Osos, California.
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There's this house up in Sandwich, NH that is so grand and strange in the middle of a country dotted with farmhouses. It has pillars and a view of distant Mount Chocorua. I've always been struck by it, but not exactly out of love, more out of spectacle and curiosity. Here it is from the golden hour tonight. Not exactly sure what I'm going to do with these images, but I seem to be collecting houses now.
Well, I said it was my muse, so here's another take on the house on the marsh. The same angle, but the images are askew, creating a dizzy, just waking up confusion. That's my son and Josh out there--only that picture is actually out on Stockyard Rd in Newburyport. Confused yet? That's ok, the image is meant to turn time on its side.
Today I drove alone out to the hills, where lonely little once-farms sit and deteriorate, trees grown up around them, lovely and old. It was overcast, and humid, but no rain was in the forecast, just clouds and sweat. The rain had come days ago, and everything was as green as summer seems when you remember it in February. The black flies were biting, and I was lost in my thoughts, when I saw this place, and it made me stop, because it was like a concentration of all I've been feeling lately, all I've been remembering.
I waited all day for a phone call that didn't come. The call would have brought good or bad news, and without it, I'm left replaying scenarios of dread and hope. So I went out to the marsh, a place that gives distant views, while maintaining an intimacy and a sense of possibility with its twisting and changing waterways. Waterways that come and go, that ebb and flow, that fill me with more questions than answers, always.
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I go to the Sedgwick Garden with my girls when I need a dose of cultivated nature. Of course I love the tangled woods and rocky shores in Gloucester that my life more resembles, but that order and guidance I find at the garden restores me.
This image of Iona is a blend of a few photos taken during different visits, and as I made it I thought of my friend Jessica who loves this spot as much as I do.
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This girl stands on the edge of adulthood, and takes a look back. The leaves have fallen and a new season is beginning.
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So many of my photos are of my children running away from me, playing in expansive spaces, I the distant and unobserved observer.
I've learned a few things about letting go.
Image: Pascal playing in a field with an abandoned barn.
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Back in the summer of 2014 when I took these pictures I was pretty blue. I had a lot going on, including a lifelong dream that I had to shelve temporarily because of a my health. A friend invited us to stay in her beautiful home for a few days while she was away, and we spent that time doing country things like kite flying and farm visiting. I remember wishing I could snap out of my depression and feel good again, and while this trip didn't do that for me, it allowed me the space and time to come to terms with my life and its surprises. While most of that summer is a warped memory of trying (and failing) to make the best of things, when I think about it now I want to give past me a hug and tell her it gets better.
Image: Iona, my mini-me, running with in a farm field with a bag of potato chips. Pascal flies a kite in the distance near the ghost of a barn.
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This image reflects what I am thinking today. In the empty structures of the past, laid rigidly and diligently kept, a younger thing is running.
Half way around White Lake there is an old beaver dam that has created a brackish fen, thick with ferns and overhanging trees that cast back shadows and suggestions of sky, but it's quite dark in there even by mid-day. While we were camping, my kids surprised me by being able to walk there without complaint. We told ghost stories along the way, Iona creating a myth of "the River of Dead Servants" and Pascal "the Castle of Doom and Destiny."
I remember my first steps, but I don't remember my daughter Iona's. The day I walked, my mother tells me that I had been practicing all day, using my cousin's twin beds in our house as guardrails. My parents were heading out for a date that night, and we were to have a babysitter. All I remember is the room, and the thought that my mother was going away. I don't remember her arms, just the room, the beds, and the evening light.
The memory is like that, it blends elements, scents, times of day, unnamed people, and replaces important things, real things, with darkness. This is Real is a validation of how my memory as a mother, hazy at times, tack-like at others, records the feelings of childhood, both my own, and my children's.
Acrylic and Polyester clear photographic box on acrylic base. 11" x 17" x 5" with white acrylic base, 17" x 6" x 5"
SOLD
Acrylic plexiglass and polyester dimensional photograph sculpture, 13" x 17" x 5"
UNAVAILABLE
Acrylic Plexiglass and Polyester Dimensional Photograph, 17" x 17" x 5" with detachable white acrylic base. 17" x 6" x 5", 2017
Acrylic Plexiglass and Polyester Dimensional Photograph. 11" x 17" x 5". Comes with detachable base.
SOLD
11" x 17" x 5" with detachable base. (2017)
UNAVAILABLE
Acrylic plexiglass and polyester dimensional photograph, 11" x 17" x 5" with detachable base. 2017.
SOLD
Acrylic plexiglass and polyester dimensional photograph, 11" x 17" x 5" with detachable white acrylic base, 17" x 6" x 5". 2017.
Acrylic plexiglass and polyester dimensional photograph, 11" x 17" x 5" with detachable base. 2017.
Acrylic plexiglass and polyester dimensional photograph, 11" x 17" x 5" with detachable base. 2017.
M
Acrylic plexiglass and polyester dimensional photograph, 11" x 17" x 5" with detachable base. 2017.
SOLD
a little girl in a double exposure runs toward a field. the sky is gathering clouds.
a toddler, in an antique coat, pauses to look at strange light glowing through a forest.
siblings wade in a murky inlet. one seems to hear something. one is running away.
two small children cross a center line. one coming toward us, one runs away. A large house sits in the distance.
a toddler contemplates a river, dark and verdant. it is high summer.
a young girl in a pale garden wears a white dress. a scene from the imagination.
a little girl in red shoes approaches an imaginary landscape. The light glows to one side. the ghost of a house on the other.
A young girl hurries down a garden path. The light indicates that the daylight is nearly gone.
a double timed exposure of a little girl running in an ancient garden landscape, a time travel, a setting sun.
The viral "me too" posting prompted this image of a girl walking alone in the woods. Obviously, me too.
2014.
The piece that sparked the name of the series. A dusty, pink, wintery scene, with a child walking alone down a snowy dirt road.
2014. Private Collection.
Steel construction box with polyester photographs.
This was my first box. The mystery and the beauty that it created excited me, and whet my appetite to create more images like this. I still feel excited when I look at it. It belongs to a private collector.
2014.
The images from this box later became a larger piece included in my Mother Vision series, and is now in a private collection. The subtlety and atmosphere, the clarity and the delicateness still captivate me.
2014.
The original of this piece did not survive, but the images were so beautiful that I re-made the box for my Mother Vision series. This piece sold at auction at the Ogden Museum.
This is my earliest body of dimensional photography, when I was still in the experimental phase. I had no idea what I was doing! But I needed to make these transparent images, housed in boxes, and I needed other people to see them. This work was accepted into the No Dead Artists show at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, and is what prompted the director there to encourage me to make them more permanent structurally. These works no longer exist to show, but they will always be close to me. The artist statement for Mother Vision grew out of this work. I have and will continue to explore the dimensions of childhood through a motherhood lens. Memory of coming of age through witnessing coming of age. the strange and delicate balance of becoming oneself.
2014.
When a friend of mine saw this at a show, she said she wanted to take it and rub it all over her belly. That's my favorite compliment!
I would love to make a new version of this box. The original was too unstable and didn't survive.
These still images use translucent graphic elements to picture time and to capture the subjects in a moment.
a re-visioning of an earlier work, this piece frames a young girl in a colorful hourglass.
a young girl walks down a country path in the autumn. a giant hourglass marks the passage.
A toddler is set aglow in an hourglass motif. somewhat sci-fi, is that an otherworldly light?
a beautiful summer evening, prisms of graphic rainbow and circle.
A children's scene with a quilted graphic.
A striped beach scene. A circle portal.
a beautiful marsh scene in high summer. the sky is mottled with clouds.
Featured in Float Magazine.
An hourglass marks the transition of day into night.
a venn diagram of land, sea and air.
Three circles, a gull in the middle, over a tranquil beach at the end of the day.
colors mark the changing of the seasons.
Circles overlap to connect land, sea, and air.
