Vestiges
The images in this project share an attention to shape. The shape of beauty. The shape of a region. Time in dialogue with place, shaping specificity in a landscape. The work in Vestiges was created while traveling through unfamiliar areas of rural Georgia. With each detour and wrong turn, I began to comprehend an all-too-familiar narrative: land that has been used and recycled many times. My travels bore witness to merely one of this region’s stories. Its book described a complex beauty — pages singed at the edges by a smoldering urgency.
Forested fields give way to produce farms give way to managed forests give way to chicken farms give way to solar fields. What then? Vestiges is an act of meditation with the ghosts that embody our inhabited lands. The work is a reflection on the unsettling, breath-taking feeling of experiencing only one snapshot of time, knowing that countless other iterations have existed in the past. An unknown number will take shape in the future.
Vestiges was presented at the College of Environment + Design at the University of Georgia in 2023, as part of the second installation of Listening to the Land. In addition to the 23 images created for the exhibition, three posters were created to complement the work, adding original poetry and design to the project. An extended version of the work was presented at the 2024 Southern Humanities Council in Savannah, GA, with Anna Gage Norton and Rob McDonald.
Installation view: images were curated and organized into a large-scale map of the region, based on the relative locations where each image was made, further emphasizing how shape and movement informs place. The installation was a collaboration with Susan Patrice, who contributed two large black and white prints, as seen in the middle of the view.