Process: The Pinhole Experience      ||      View the Artifacts Gallery     ||     2010 Calendar

I have been working on this series for almost four years and I am still actively creating new images. These photographs are not digital collages; the artifacts are actually present in the landscape in which they are photographed. The photographs and the experience of creating them exist on more than one level and it is this multi-level quality that keeps the series fresh and intriguing for me, a crucial component for any long-term creative project.

The most fundamental way to view the series is as an exploration of the still life and the landscape. Both genres have a long history in painting and photography and the arrangements in these photographs are a blend of the two. In working on this project my previous experience with the landscape as subject has been reinvigorated and re-imagined by pairing it with the enigma of the artifacts I place there. My own reaction to and interpretation of the natural landscape in photographic terms has undergone a shift in perception. Though these images certainly celebrate the incredible diversity, beauty, mystery and magnificence of the natural world, the landscape also serves as the stage setting for quiet and slightly surreal tableaus that reflect the world of people through a survey various artifacts.

As I contemplate where I have been and where I am going with this series, my mind plays with the visual contours and metaphorical possibilities of different types of landscapes and how they might interact with a certain artifact of an uncertain origin. In some cases the images that I create, and the artifacts and landscapes featured in them, are envisioned months before I actually expose the scene on film.

I also see the photographs like stories or poems, small fictions that suggest a story, inviting the viewer to step in and follow where it may lead them. Words have always been a favorite means of creative expression and I respect and value the forms of essay, short story and poem as vehicles for expressing ideas, building narratives and creating images through language. The photographs in the Artifacts series, individually and as a group, represent the framework of a story, but one in which you only see a glimpse of what has happened or what is about to happen. It is up to the viewer to fill in the rest.

And then there are the artifacts themselves, which also suggest themes or ideas. Many of them are obvious in what they might represent, while others are more enigmatic. Some exist not only as visual contrasts with their surroundings (the small tea kettle and the huge landing craft), but also as symbolic and metaphorical contrasts (the tea kettle representing comfort, warmth, home and the landing craft suggesting war and conflict). The structure of the series creates a vessel with which to explore different ideas through the placement of certain artifacts in specific landscapes ( the gingerbread house in the surf as a meditation on the rising sea levels that will result from climate change), or simply to enjoy the serendipitous chance of an unexpected discovery.

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