Guest Essay: Unity

I'm interested in the unity of experience, perception, and expression. To see the world in terms of what is inside or outside of myself, feels like an inaccurate binary, a misunderstanding. Feelings that arise in the presence of beauty are the result of energetic resonance and alignment, a form of communication between self and others including those to whom the term, sentience, may not typically be attached.

It’s no accident that the forms and function of the human nervous system and those of other organisms including those of the plant world, are visually and functionally similar. The primary distinction between them is mainly a matter of processing speed. Working in the landscape and even in my own garden, I feel what  John O’Donohue wrote to be true,  “...the Beautiful offers us an invitation to order, coherence and unity. When these needs are met, the soul feels at home in the world.”

I began photographing in the landscape in 2017. Initially, working on Lake Superior, later in Nova Scotia, Baraboo, Wisconsin and other places. Initially, overwhelmed by the beauty and fragility I encountered,  I spent a lot of time walking, getting to know the land and myself, reconnecting with the knowing that everything was alive and in communication. My experiences in the land, my relationships with each place, plant and person, are indelibly stamped in memory.  It is all of that to which these pieces speak and I hope, carry their meaning forward to you.

A Year in Light: A Practice of Encounter

A Year in Light is a durational photographic project structured around a daily encounter with morning light. Each day at sunrise, I photograph the same bathroom window. The setting is deliberately ordinary. The light shifts. Some days a small gesture enters the frame, often a hand or arm, registering presence. Other days, the window remains unoccupied.

Every image is paired only with its date. Repetition establishes a temporal framework in which subtle variations accumulate: shifts in season, atmosphere, bodily state, and attention. Over time, duration itself becomes the primary subject.

The project draws from Virginia Woolf’s sense of consciousness as something stitched from lived moments, and from Agnes Martin’s disciplined repetition and commitment to stillness as a condition for clarity. Like Martin, the work relies on recurrence rather than spectacle. The image is not forced. It is awaited. The gesture, when it appears, is investigative rather than performative, a brief check-in with the body and a question of how it is possible to be here today.

While many light-based works locate transcendence in vast or dramatic landscapes, A Year in Light situates contemplative rigor within an intimate domestic interior. The bathroom, a private and often overlooked space, becomes a site of sustained attention. Rather than rejecting monumentality, the work reframes it, proposing that seriousness and duration need not rely on scale, spectacle, or heroic geography. The domestic is neither incidental nor decorative. It is deliberate. The sacred emerges through repetition, return, and embodied presence, held within a space long associated with privacy and daily ritual and rarely afforded sustained contemplative weight.

Historically, luminous domestic interiors have been sites where women were observed. Here, the vantage point shifts. The body is not presented for viewing but becomes the author of its own encounter with light. Photographing is not display but contact, a daily act of self-witnessing enacted from within.

Each dated image stands alone, yet resolves fully only within accumulation. In its intended installation form, the photographs will be printed on translucent fabric and suspended within a darkened room, creating a three-dimensional field of repetition with subtle irregularity, a grid loosened into space. Minimal stitching will link select panels, referencing time’s connective labor without imposing linear progression. There is no fixed focal point or prescribed path. Visitors move at their own pace and direction, encountering the images without hierarchy or a singular vantage from which the work resolves.

At its core, A Year in Light is a record of encounter: light and body, self and world, held within a space that is personal, disciplined, and quietly self-possessed.

108 Days: Attentive Field: Light in the Domestic Space

A camera-less, durational work made inside the home, where light, time, and daily attention gather into a field of refuge and quiet change.

108 Days is a camera-less, durational photographic work I made inside my home. Each day, I hand-tore an 8 x 8 inch square of mulberry paper, salted it, sensitized it with silver nitrate, placed it in a fixed position, and exposed it for twenty-four hours. One day yielded one square. Over time, the prints accumulated into a field: 108 days of light registered not as depiction, but as atmosphere, rhythm, density, drift, and quiet change. As the work evolved, I allowed the structure to open slightly, adding occasional companion exposures in other areas of the house, beside a slow-growing jade plant, near other houseplants, and in other quiet zones of domestic life.

I made this work in the house my husband and I rent, a simple and humble space that became a real refuge during a year marked by upheaval, difficulty, and grace. Gaston Bachelard’s writing on the oneiric house, the home as a space of reverie, intimacy, memory, and psychic life, helped me understand more fully why this work needed to be made there. The house is not just the setting for the project, but one of its deepest subjects. Making these prints became a way of honoring that refuge and offering heartfelt gratitude for the shelter, tenderness, and repair the space made possible.

Made without a camera, the prints hold light as both subject and agent. They register time, material, and lived experience through a quiet collaboration between chemistry, sunlight, weather, and waiting. The work grows out of my engagement with minimal and perceptual traditions, as well as a broader belief in attention as a form of reverence. I think of 108 Days as a score shaped by repetition, restraint, and sustained looking. Rather than taking an image from the world, it creates the conditions for the world to inscribe itself slowly. The paper receives; the day composes.