Slow Drift is an in-progress project that explores the gradual, often invisible, relationships between climate change, identity, and American extraction by focusing on communities and landscapes that connect to former tobacco economies and plantations in Maryland and Virginia. With a view camera and medium format camera, the project documents past tobacco plantations and surrounding landscapes and towns, the project conveys time passing as landscapes, the built environment, vegetation, objects and personal stories that connect to these sites across generations, remain, resist and evolve.
In my work, I often challenge perception and boundaries, representing grief, and long-term passing of time. With elements of the material earth (soil, river and ocean water, light), I make impressions of the land, relationships to it, and to each other. Reflexive images that gather and refract. These approaches are for me about finding ways for the earth and time to dictate the terms of its own picturing.
I became interested in these questions when I learned that the Maryland neighborhood where I spent most of my childhood was carved out of the plantation where abolitionist and minister Josiah Henson, whose autobiography greatly influenced the book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was enslaved. The chemigrams were produced by exposing light-sensitive paper to photo chemicals and different materials gathered onsite. All of the work considers the physicality of place, the subtleties of light and the ways that history imprints on locations, which in turn shapes our present.
This work is supported through a VisArts Studio Fellowship, the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, The Puffin Foundation, The Maryland State Arts Council and Maryland Institute College of Art’s Adjunct Faculty Grant.
