Artist Statement

I enjoy challenging expectations, but my desire to find beauty in patterns often contradicts this. Pattern, after all, requires repetition, and repetition is the projection of the past into the future. This, too, is a foundational element of expectations. Ideas of the future are tethered to activities of the past. Having lived in the Mississippi Delta for nearly fifty years I am conditioned, in part, by the echoes of atrocities absorbed in the land. Loss and strife linger in this region. The social patterns born of the economic desire to capitalize on the rich soil there are not patterns worth repeating. Neighborhoods are still shaped along racial lines, schools are barely integrated, and economic disparity continues.
 
And yet, each spring the dirt in the Delta is prepared for growth. By early fall, the earth is abundant with life, and by winter, it is gray and barren again. This song of birth-life-death-rebirth occurs through preparation, diligence, presence, and serendipity. This is a stunningly magnified pattern from which we can learn. Change has occurred here, slowly but methodically and in a rhythm that receives its guidance from the land.

My work examines patterns I have been conditioned to make a part of my life - institutions, relationships, hierarchies, life, death, loss and gain, etc. - and documentary photography’s role as an enabler in these structures. I utilize traditional analog photographic process to make references to people, places, object, and ideas of the South, but I deliberately use these materials in ways that also question the boundaries of the medium itself. I am increasingly enamored with finding ways in which opposing processes can be used in synchronicity -developer and fixer, for example, are constantly fighting for space on the prints. Through this work, I seek to maintain and understand the tension required to keep opposites from overwhelming one another, and I look for moments where these opposites come together to form creations that could only exist because of their polarities.