STATEMENT OF WORK

My current interdisciplinary practice is centered around photography and ways to expand the outlines of what the medium constitutes. My recent work, while referring to historical photographic image making, attempts to also expand the medium's vocabulary, to examine its relationships to other ways of making, as well as its possible functionality and agency in our contemporary current reality.

Specifically, in the work I am submitting for the Luxembourg Art Prize, I am interested in bridging the gap between photography and hand-made craft by creating a relationship between the two, as a way to heal and restore our understanding of our environment and ourselves as relational beings.  In "Primal Radiant Force" and "We Are the Event Horizon of Existence Itself" I combine large-format analog black and white photograph printed on silver gelatin paper, with a slow, meditative handmade weave where the thread is woven around the loom in a circular manner. Each of these slow weaves are the result of approximately three months of concentrated work, and they create a radiating, healing web alongside the photo of arid earth, which also resembles the curves of the female form. 

The photos were taken in the oldest desert in the world, the Namib desert in Namibia, where I traveled with a view camera and recorded the shifting dune landscape over three seasons. The desert images are quiet and elicit a spiritual and ancient presence, while also reminding us of the harshness of an arid environment in a world of changing climate conditions. 

In these large photo constructions there is a negotiation between the handmade and the technological. The weaves were created as a response to the photos, they suggest possible healing relationships between two methods of thinking and making. The hand-made, tactile craft connects with the technological retinal capture, suggesting a possible way forward.