Winter Bird, photography, encaustic, and oil on wood, 6" x 18.5", 2005

Fictional Truth
I started out in art as a drawer and printmaker. This body of work feels very close to that original impulse to make objects. And I always have loved photography because I never knew what to draw—with a camera, the world presents itself to you. I think it's why I can't shoot journalistically, because the event is not interesting to me, the truth is not interesting to me. I'm really interested in the same way that a novelist is interested in using words and characters and lives to present a fictional truth. I'm interested in a fictional truth, some kind of metaphoric understanding of things that exist in the world, whether those things are tangible or not. Using photography implies that there's a tangible touchstone, and that's all I want photography to be, a place to start.

Straight Abstraction

Swamp with Bug Wings and Lotus, photography, encaustic, and oil on wood, 2.65" x 3.65", 2005

I've never been the kind of photographer that needs to shoot all the time. I'll have 20 sheets of film, and that'll do me for the season. Out of that, I'll get images that I like, and because I allow myself five variations on each image, that'll keep me going for a long time. I need to photograph, I need that connection to the world—because you have to use something to illustrate what's inside of you. Straight abstraction doesn't interest me. I'm interested in the intersection of abstraction and real life, the tension between the two. But I'm not interested in abstraction by itself, so I need that other side. I just don't need it as much as most photographers.

The Struggle to Start a Family
The struggle to start a family has driven the emotional end of this work. We spent three years trying to get pregnant and then two years trying to adopt. When we were trying to get pregnant, each time I got my period I would make a piece. A lot of them were ugly and messy and full of angst, but it was a way to get through it. To make art out of it is a way to keep going personally, to feel like: all is not lost, at least I made a piece. That seemed to be an effective technique, so I started to do it more.

Winter

Branches, photography, encaustic, and oil on wood, 14" x 18", 2005

I hate winter, I hate being cold, I hate the snow. This whole photographic series started about this time of year, when you start to get those gorgeous garden catalogs in the mail. It's a way my garden has never looked but it inspires desire in me in the way that men never have. I love my husband, but there's something about going to other people's gardens—I get jealous of people's flowers. It just awakens something in me, getting those catalogs in January and February. I started to cut the flowers out of the catalogs and tape them on the dead stalks in my yard and take pictures of them, just as a way to have what I wanted. I decided that this feeling of longing is too much, I was going to have it, and I was going to have it where I wanted it. But the photographs didn't come out happy. They came out sort of dark and Victorian.

What I want is a different season, but I can draw that season on top of it. I can draw that in the encaustic. I can transform what's there into something else. So I have that stinking, horrible two hours out in the snow photographing, but it kind of makes it better that I'm making something in the season that I hate.

Teaching
I teach third-year undergraduate photography, when students are making their first serious body of work. I love my role as a guide, to be there for that moment of making the decision to be an artist, finding out if they have the commitment or not. I try and help them find their groove—what technique do they like, what subject is important to them, what rhythm for artmaking works for them. I love nurturing that in my students. It's not about technique. I don't care if they use a Xerox machine. It's about finding what they have to say as artists.

Day for Night

Blue Oak Leaves, photography, encaustic, and oil on wood, 14" x 18.5", 2005

The film I use is a negative-positive film. I shoot in winter, so the negative needs a certain amount of time to develop. In the cold, it needs more time. And I never gave it enough time. The images solarize because of that. I get this otherworldly effect, a sort of day-for-night feeling to the images and they felt emotional to me, more emotional than literal. I liked them as prints, but they never felt done to me. Once I started with encaustic, drawing on top of them, making them more sculptural, they felt like they reflected more an of an emotional internal landscape than the prints by themselves.

The Way the Light Hits
In college, I did a study of the ways that people celebrate faith. Both my grandfathers were extremely religious, from different ends of the Judeo-Christian spectrum—one was a fundamentalist Baptist and one was an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. And it was just bad—the worst pictures I've ever made. The whole "covering a story" thing is not me, I'm not interested in it. I would find myself interested in the way the light hit the voodoo priest I was shooting. I'd be fascinated with him, but I was more fascinated with the way he looked than the telling a story with a picture, which was what I needed to do.

First Day of Hunting Season, photography, encaustic, and oil on wood, 10" x 36.5", 2005