Artist Statement

My photographs of landscape are visual records of a sentient being, standing on the earth. More poignantly, these new photographs are expressions of grief and love for the earth; grief for the loss happening every day, and yet unabated love for this place I live on/walk on/inhabit. These are ordinary photographs of nearby places, none much further than an hour’s drive from our house. Most were taken within the past year.

A visit to Farandnear, a Trustees of Reservations property in Shirley, marks the beginning of this exploration. Farandnear was the summer home of the Banks family for several generations, named so, because at 50 miles from their ancestral home in Wollaston, it was “far” enough to require a two-day journey by horse to reach, but “near” enough to be a vacation home. The name aptly describes my journey.

Over the past year, my husband and I took weekly outings – day trips and hikes – to Trustees and Audubon properties and reserves, initially as a way to get out of the house during covid. Walking through wild stretches of nearby land which has been preserved gives a feeling of time travel, far into the past. A swamp where beavers are not restricted could look the same today as it did 100 or 200 years ago. At the same time, I have walked and photographed the very close and present land and landscapes outside my front door for decades – woods along the Charles River, my own backyard and garden,neglected patches of growth around town, or in an abandoned and overgrown nursery. For me there is no distinction between the beauty of the untouched landscapes or the ones we often overlook because they are ubiquitous. It’s a matter of paying attention. They all hold both grief and love within the frame. Many of these images encompass both near and far in composition and focus. We often feel like we are looking past or through a screen or veil. So many images are lush with growth; even in winter the earth offers an abundance. There is a complexity in the details that both draw the viewer in and at the same time hold us back. Similarly, the climate crisis feels both far - in that we can’t fully comprehend the most horrific events yet to come, so we push them away - and unbelievably near, in that mere observation of ice on the Charles River or plants in the garden tell us what is happening before our eyes.

These photographs could be my version of a land acknowledgement, the ritual recognizing of the many generations who have cared for and inhabited this place where we live, long before we arrived. They could be a way to acknowledge the sentience of the earth, our relationship with it, its ability to communicate if we look, listen, and feel. The late Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh was asked what we need to do to save our world. “What we most need to do,” he replied, “is to hear within us the sound of the earth crying.”

I am training as if my life depended on it to do just that.