I have a stipulation: do not bring back any broken shells. And so I set off on my bike and make my way to the beach where I crawl over limestone rocks onto the ragged shore of sand and silt. But my rule is a deception I tell myself. I begin picking up shattered shells one by one, watching their calcified forms spiral in and crack, my gaze held in their grooves and my fingers running over the algae and growth creeping over their surfaces. I bike back to my apartment with my coat pockets bulging.
*
My practice is rooted in the joy of looking, and then of looking again. It is an engagement with my visual, perceptual encounters often focusing on organic matter. I gather these fragments and employ drawing, photography, and writing as ways to study and reflect on how these fragments are interlocked in a continuous cycle. I am also interested in how these mediums allow me to collect and record fragments, whether moments snapped through the lens of my grandfather’s old camera or my own marks building up across a surface to fabricate an image of what I see around me. Materials and moments emerge, solitary, but interact with each other; distinct, yet ebbing and flowing into the next.
It is for this reason that I became excited by a defect in the lens of my grandfather’s camera which led to a black line through the bottom of every image. While the moment may have faded, it flowed into the next, myself and the camera linking each one. The black line is a reminder of this connection. This temporality of each moment reveals the fragility of not only my surroundings, but of myself as well. Nothing lasts, yet everything continues on in some new form, which reveals the vulnerability of life, but also a depth and complexity that unfolds not only around and but within oneself.