A Fever Called Home

This project emerged from a need to translate my memories into a visual language- not to reconstruct them, but to understand the personal histories and traumas embedded within them. The photographs reflect the paradoxes of my home, where life and death coexist in constant tension. They also challenge the inherited myths, the unseen narratives that shape us before we can even name them.

I return to the Everglades, where I was raised, a place both fragile and untamed, now under relentless threat. It is a terrain of contradictions: beauty and loss, nurture and danger, belonging and estrangement, all intertwined. Returning after 10 years away, I confront what it means, especially as a woman, to inhabit a landscape that both sustains and imperils.

Through my photographs, I want to look this environment in the face—to witness its pain, its beauty, and the deep trauma of loving and calling home a place that is disappearing and invisible to so many. I hope the work holds space for the complexity of grief and wonder that coexist in a vanishing landscape, while also reckoning with what it means to belong to something so fragile. I want to question what it means to belong to a place that never offered choice. To love a landscape that is vanishing—sinking, burning, bleeding—yet remains unbearably beautiful.

Using a large format camera loaded with paper negatives, I create images that hover between dream and memory, fragile and unstable. These are counterpointed by 35mm photographs that ground the work in immediacy and materiality. Together, they embody the friction between illusion and reality, between the desire to escape and the inescapable imprint of place.

This body of work is an excavation of self as much as land. It reflects on how we carry the places that shape us, and the cost of attempting to lay them down. Florida was not just my home; it was my first mirror. This is my attempt to hold its gaze.