A little bit ago, a woman I know lit her friend’s barn on fire. She set the blaze out of spite, simultaneously incited by gossip and provoking gossip. The woman, who was seven months pregnant at the time, stood alone in front of the barn watching the fire creep up the wood. She told me that she was only there for a few minutes before she felt her water break, going into labor four weeks early. She ran across the street to the property owner's house and demanded a ride to the hospital as the proof of her arson was smoldering behind her.
Small-town gossip, relationships to the land, the mysteries of wildlife, the drama of humanity, and the unpredictability of human spectacle inspire the stories in this work. I’m fascinated by the instability of storytelling and hope to enable character and landscape to act as gossip in their own right: cross-pollinating and synthesizing. As this project continues to evolve in a time of pandemic, I have also begun looking at how small communities consider an increasing prevalence of death.
The often disregarded underbelly of a post-fact world seems to be the simultaneous beauty and danger of fiction. I’m interested in photography as a medium of hybridity—weavings of myth filled with tangents and nuances, treading the lines of journalism, performance, acts of obsession, and examination storytelling. I’m interested in pushing past questions of validity that are traditional in documentary photography and into a much more human sense of reality: faulted, broken, and real.
