Vestibule
Front Gallery
Relative
Body and land, moved by the same forces.
Some works contain nudity and close studies of the human body.
Artist reflection
The series was first called My Body Is the Land I’m From. It began with the thought that our bodies may be the only land we can ever actually own, even if only temporarily before they change shape again. They are the one place we inhabit from the inside, and therefore something we are responsible for tending. I was also reckoning with years of body shame and dysmorphia. Seeing waistbands as sediment lines, stretch marks as bark, and skin as terrain gave me another way to look.
Over time the pairing became more literal to me. Body and land are both shaped by pressure, weather, history, use, repair, gravity, and time. The photographs place them beside one another as related material.
Garden
This Morning I Was Gathering Daffodils
A cycle imposed and inhabited at the same time.
Artist reflection
I came to Persephone as a way to think about power inside a cycle that cannot simply be escaped. Her movement between worlds is imposed and inhabited at the same time. That led to an exploration of what it might look like to find agency within circumstances we cannot fully control.
The phrase “powerful and powerless” gave me a way to stay inside the tension without resolving it into victimhood or triumph.
“(Persephone) was winter, she was spring. When she ascended, the world awoke. When she descended, it lamented. She left; she returned. One year. Fifty. Five hundred. Forever. Powerful and powerless was she.” — Pádraig Ó Tuama, In a Garden by a Gate
Garden
Fear Not
Fear is present; the body moves anyway.
Artist reflection
Fear Not began with Lilith and Eve. I kept coming back to the old warning that ruin awaits the woman who opens her own eyes.
In these photographs curiosity is something the body does: reaching, tasting, looking, and letting what I see change me. The body moves through fear into knowing.
Garden
Taste and See
The body can be seen and still be allowed to want.
Artist reflection
The first images began with Venus imagery and the long visual history of arranging feminine beauty for a viewer. Appetite gradually moved to the center of the work.
Honey, flowers, anointing, pleasure, and excess let the body become an experiencing subject. Beauty could include hunger. The body could be seen and still be allowed to want.
Grotto
A Miscarriage
Witnessing myself inside an experience I could barely understand.
This work documents a miscarriage as it happened.
Artist reflection
At the time, I was documenting a real miscarriage as it was happening. I was not thinking about portals or interrupted becoming. I was trying to witness myself inside an experience I could barely understand while I was living it.
The camera gave me a small amount of distance. I think part of that distance was protective: I could be the person in the experience and, for moments, also the observer of it. Much of what I now understand about the work came years later.
Grotto
Phase
Not “I am hopelessness,” but “I am experiencing hopelessness.”
Artist reflection
These images began as synesthetic translations of emotional states experienced during the winter of 2024. For much of my life, an emotional state could feel total: not I feel hopeless, but I am hopelessness.
This series marks a shift toward distance without disavowal: I am experiencing hopelessness. The photographs stay with the unstable interval where one state has loosened and another has not yet become recognizable. Winter keeps only what survives the cold.
Rear Gallery
Threshold
Transformation has begun but cannot yet be named.
Artist reflection
Threshold began with the feeling of being between lives: no longer inside the former shape, not yet able to see the next one clearly. I wanted to stay with that middle long enough to see what it actually felt like.
As I worked, anatomy began behaving like architecture. Folds became passages, openings became rooms, and the body became a spatial boundary that could be approached from either side.
Narthex