Ancestral Landscapes
IMAGES
Because it was land that drew my ancestors to this continent, it is through landscape photographs I explored the complexities of my American heritage. As I stood in the places my ancestors stood on both sides of the Atlantic, I felt a connection between their lives and mine.
In the summer of 2019, I visited ancestral homelands in Germany and the Netherlands. I experimented with printing these landscape photographs larger by printing them in sections on fabric. Based on samples of this work, and to bookend my visit to his German point of departure, I received a Durham Art Council Emerging Artist Grant for Photography to support travel to Iowa the summer of 2020. There I took photographs of the land my paternal grandparents first settled this country .
The first series of work I exhibited from this grant-supported work was Meadows as liminal spaces, softly focused images of meadows in and around Davenport, Iowa, along with others I had taken on the island of Fehmarn, Germany the previous year.
Included were images from both places of meadows dense with tall grasses and wildflowers, a safe haven for butterflies, bees, birds, liminal spaces between rivers and forests, roads and fields. Spacious and open to new possibilities. Transitory states not unlike the lives of my migrant grandparents and great grandparents.
As I continued my travel, my visual work evolved to meet my desire to re-create the time-shifting experiences In the places where I knew they had stood, I felt a quiet knowing inside myself, sensing their presence in the present and the hard edges of linear time dissolved for a moment. To convey the emotional resonance of ancestral memory, I merged vintage ancestor portraits with landscapes of places they or their ancestors had lived, sometimes layering them in digital software and sometimes in multiple physical layers. Image fragments and unfinished edges were meant to convey the piecemeal and dreamlike quality of memory. This new work found its way into a solo show at the Durham Arts Council in September and October 2022. I left work uncovered to allow viewers to experience the materiality of the pieces directly. I envision using the digitally merged images in my book manuscript and in a stand-alone photo book. I continue to create new layered images, experimenting with presenting increasing numbers of ancestors standing together across space and time.
It is sometimes difficult to separate the text and image work of this project. Both emerged from my research and travel experience. Each informed the other, but are not text/image reflections of each other. Each visual or written piece can be meaningfully understood on its own, but the collection of pieces also fits together as a larger whole. The whole will have a meaning of its own also, though I do not believe it will necessarily be greater than the sum of its parts. The book will be published with a number of images included, and I will continue to explore opportunities to share the work as a multi-media experience.
