The World is Astonishing

Traywick Contemporary Solo Exhibition, Nov. 2020 - Jan. 2021

This series of photographs plays with the temporality of the lumen printing process to explore ideas around landscape, time, and our mortal planet.

For nearly five years I have been working cameraless, exploring the Lumen process. This work all falls under the general title, “Lumen Notebook.” Lumen prints are a simple photographic process, made by exposing black & white photo papers to light to bring out latent color in the paper.

I have been responding to the fugitive colors in this experimental process as markers of time passing. Time has been a particular focus this past year as the Pandemic places our collective futures on pause. As days and hours speed by or slow to a crawl, we are reminded of time’s elasticity. These abstract images that make up the exhibition, “The World is Astonishing,” reference pictorial components of the landscape, horizon lines, the movement of the sun, vegetation, as well as cataloging endangered birds, ferns, flowers. These lumen prints also converse with art and photo books on the natural world and the landscape that have been seminal for me.

I have been making the work in nature, at different residencies and my Canadian cabin, where the birds, ferns and wildflowers abound. Each sunprint is the product of a different photo paper, a reflection of time, place, weather and photo alchemy. Each is a personal meditation, as colors change, slowly or quickly, in the variegated light of the sun.