Fossil Poetry
Wild plants choose the space in which they reside; they have memory, and they learn. Domesticated plants grow and thrive based on the care and attention they receive. Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer quantifies plants as “animated, living beings and as living beings they breathe, dance and preen”.
When I first started this project, I was attending an artist residency where I was striving to create an intimate connection to the art-making space I was inhabiting. I do not consider myself a nature photographer. Photographing the natural world has never sparked my creativity but there is something about the plants surrounding me, coupled with the ideas conjured from Kimmerer’s words, as well as the fact that the lumen process requires letting go of control and relishing in experimentation that has spoken to my soul as an artist.
Archival Images from Cameraless Lumen Prints
Lumen Prints are solar photograms – a cameraless photographic process involving black and white photographic paper, in this case organic materials, such as flowers, plant life, seaweed alongside household organic substances, examples include salt, turmeric, kelp, beetroot, and spirulina and exposed in Sunlight. The Sun reacts with and infiltrates the organic materials to produce image registration and colors in the black and white paper. The original images are temporary; continued exposure to the sun will result in the disappearance of the imagery while fixing the photographic paper dilutes the quality of color and texture. In my process, the images are exposed, scanned, enlarged, and printed archivally on aluminum metal.
A Note about Locations
I began making Lumens in 2018. Each body of Lumens are made in a specific place. At this time, I have created bodies of Lumens in Portage, Indiana at the Taleamor Park Artist Residency, in my home in Fort Wayne, Indiana during the 2020 quarantine, in my family home in Southern Georgia, at The Golden Apple Artist Residency in Coastal Maine and at South Porch Artist Residency in Summerville, South Carolina.