My work in the series A Sojourn in Seasons is based on the common wooded landscape of my day to day life - places that are far more ordinary than spectacular.
The images are firmly grounded in the natural world, a particular place, a particular season, a particular time. By photographing with a purposefully oversized pinhole or a radically defocused lens, however, I capture trees and foliage as they are not often seen. Details are obscured, and only the strongest elements remain: the images become sketches with light, literally and figuratively.
The work is unabashedly retinal. But it is also as much object as it is image. The pieces are translucent, reflective and tactile - as a result of the infusion of encaustic into and on the surface of the Japanese Kozo paper. The pieces float off the wall (held in place only by strong magnets at the top), and move with air current in a room. If you are close enough, the scent of the bees’ wax in the encaustic is clearly detectable.
The work is intended to speak directly to the senses: to bypass, on some level, the rational brain. I am happiest when it sits on the balance point between the concrete and the abstract, perception and memory, the there and the not there.
I began this series when my father started loosing both his sight and his memory. Strangely, the work has been comforting. Beauty, though fleeting and fragile, consoles. |
Winter Plumeria
pigment ink on Japanese Kozo with encaustic
36" x 22.5" |
