Umbra

The sharp edge of your whistle

flew through the golden haze of early evening

calling me home

Running....

downstairs and to gently glowing portals

pressing warm flushed cheeks

towards iridescent sparkles

falling from an open sky, exclaiming

this must have been your doing.

You are there

in the cathedral of gnarled wooden spires

searching...

among brown, dead leaves for the honeycombed shape of

coveted mushrooms

The steady rumble of the mower at magic hours and moment in between

Spilled birdseed across a cold white sheet and the sudden gale of wings

Drifting...

away from this world and looking across the warped, glittering landscape

to your reassuring wave

A storm…

pitch dark clouds trespassing across a resistant blue sky

the leg of a plastic chair scraping concrete was

your signal, calling me home:

“Let’s watch this monster come in, together”

--

Two years after leaving what I knew as home, my father was diagnosed with cancer. In that same year, I began to collect my feelings of nostalgia and homesickness into a series of photographs that would become Umbra. The impending absence of my father passed over the safety of my memories like a shadow, and my reality began to break apart. For a little over seven years I made photographs to find my way back home and cope with the anxiety of losing a parent, creating a fragile world that exists someplace between magic, sorrow, and memory.