Between December of 2017 and February of 2018, I participated in a residency at Listhús Artspace in Ólafsfjörđur, Iceland. Surrounded by mountains, Ólafsfjörđur is a northeasterly town, about 40km from the Arctic Circle.
This residency was part of a local festival known as Skammdegi, or “dark days”. The term refers to a period of winter when the sun never rises above the mountains and shines, in the darkest weeks, for under four hours each day.
“The Story of You” is my experience of this darkness. A meditation on connection and lost ties, it presents a psychic and emotional landscape through the manipulated analogue print. These unsettling images shift between the aesthetics of historical and contemporary photography, combining disparate eras and geographies. This work functions as a mind, scanning through moments of personal history, and marked by uncertainty, desire and regret.
By blending a variety of processes, papers, scales and subject, I celebrate the diversity of the photographic language and a revived interest in the experimental darkroom. Even the borders of my prints are ripe with mark-making. This variety allows me to create visual poems that explore the emotional undercurrents of my environment, and emphasize the materiality of the photograph – a print with a particular texture, tonal range and tint, an object you can hang on the wall or hold in your hands.
With few exceptions - the Arizona desert, a Calgary hotel - this work was photographed in the Icelandic winter.
