Everybody's Island

My work explores themes of womanhood, aging, and the quotidian. 

In my work, I am always searching for ways to create a new truth within a moment, transforming our perception of reality. I am interested in the small moments that go unnoticed, subtle details of the body that one wouldn't usually look at for an extended time. Intimate moments are revealed through the observation of touch, exposed skin, and pressed bodies during in-between moments.

In this group of pictures, I am looking at how gestures and touch connect the women I photograph. I began making these photos using my mother and two younger sisters as subjects, which soon extended to women I met through friends, online, and ads. I see these women who populate my images as a community of sorts -- entangled in the landscape, caring for one another, coming together in this partly fictionalized world. Still, there are moments of solitude and reflection -- a woman gazing at the water on a rock, a woman dragged through the grass. Beliefs are woven into our gestures, passed down from one another. They lie amongst the quotidian, embedded into our very beings. Simple interactions we repeat and observe performed by our mothers, grandmothers, and sisters. I am interested in how these connections shape our worth, how the physical relationship between individuals holds importance, and how our body also contains the physical weight of experiences. Texture and surface become influential in these photos in their ability to relay the conditions of the individuals. 

I am drawn to imperfections that become nuanced within traditional beauty, the stigma of aging, and women's role in nature and our surrounding landscape. The creation of this work stems from my trauma and acts as a way to connect with other women to form a community revolving around shared experiences. I use photography as a mediator to address the inheritance of beliefs, drawing from personal experience and making photos through witnessed and staged performances.