Penumbra and Light is a still life series focusing on the quality of light as it travels, changes, and interacts with the domestic interior space of my home. I have chosen as subject matter the culinary objects that historically represent “women’s work” and hope that they may function as contested feminine symbols, serving to deconstruct and expose substantive social expectations about the role of women that patriarchal societies embrace. I intend for this work to have an implied narrative that hints at the complexities of the domestic experience and the duality between nurture and struggle, darkness and light. The chipped and broken cup, precariously stacked plates, and desiccated herbs and fruit are there to remind the viewer of the quiescent morbidity, beauty, and poetry that are articulated in scenes of gestural and symbolic expiration and that the domestic space can represent warmth and comfort but may well be a place of duality and conflict.

Aqua Blue Poems are a recent body of work that functions as a book of visual poetry. It is meant to act as a meditation on color, light, and the act of taking a photograph. Embracing the concept of failure, this work celebrates flaws and unexpected outcomes of photographic processes.

Illegible Landscapes are photographic poems inspired by Emma Lazarus’ elegy, Haunted Spot, expressing sublimity in Nature. Concepts such as erasure, deconstruction, ambiguity, and “photographic truth” drove this work. The images are activated by the words; the words are activated by the images, rendering the work cyclical and unstable. The order of the visual poems is inconsequential, there is no authoritative organization with each page referring itself to the others, and so on. The words no longer give rise to any particular truth, there is no cohesive thought, just suggestions and associations. Photography implies reality but has a tenuous relationship to truth, removing the sign from the signifier ultimately expressing a disconnection to the natural world.