Description

How does the land become a charged site of memory and history? What kind of remnants may be found from what has occurred, and still occurs, on the land and within it? There is a shifting dialogue between the seemingly static nature of what the land holds, and how the land evolves as humans live off of it, appropriate it, fight over it, and remake it. Although we humans move with our own histories within us, the land we’ve lived on stays, holding what occurs upon it as another kind of history—both exploitative and generative—waiting to be explored, questioned, and shared.

This work happens on the forest floor with a flatbed scanner as my makeshift camera. I’ve used the scanner-as-camera in my studio in the past. It occurred to me that I could take it out to the woods for new reconnaissance. For new inquiries. I think of it like collecting field recordings — allowing, listening, seeing. While waiting on the scanner to process the image I set up, I also use my phone camera as a way to take visual notes - and these set up a kind of visual play between the two modes of working.

I felt compelled to be in the landscape, working improvisationally with what I discovered. Branches, a stump stippled with fungi, desiccated leaves, stones, water -- seeing things in the forest that weren’t at first present, has led me to think about how place becomes place at all: by letting myself get lost there, I get at memories, and the history embedded in what remains.