SAERIE EILAH

This is a project begun last year when I was awaiting the birth of my daughter, Saerie Eilah. It follows the time between late Winter and early Spring in the Pacific Northwest.  

I'd hoped to create a sense of a living body coming into being through this particular moment in the seasons. A kind of animistic energy that moves like water or radiates like fire. Primordial, cosmic movements, symbolic of the recurrent processes that come from the innards of the earth, giving life from the dark body of Winter into the growing light of Spring. A celebration of the ecstatic energy that renders the blossoming of life from a sleeping earth.  

I also see a childlike quality in nature that is alive and moves around us always, even as we are not aware of it. It's a similar interest that drew me to the rituals of Haiti. An unconscious sense of the world that is ultimately one of affirmation. 

These are small, intimate portraits of the Pacific Northwest. My desire was to create a certain grandeur within something so small as the leaves of grass. Here the dimensionality of the photograph exists less because I wanted the sense of an enclosed, unified space in the way I imagine light to exist.  

The work is also in recognition of my daughter. I began this project as Saerie was first forming inside the womb, so it's a kind of picture book for a child who did not yet exist, but whose birth I was always imagining. I want the photographs to convey the sense of both womb and tomb because late Winter into early Spring -the season I most love- presents the greatest paradox. Where life and death are intimately linked and inseparable. Where each holds the other in affirmation of this unity.