Lyn Swett Miller

Still, In Motion

In May 2022, we buried my mother on a bed of compost she and I created together. Surrounded by the mycorrhizae she loved, my mother was now in the care of others and I was free from my 56 year responsibility to make her happy. Since birth, my job had been to bring joy and distraction after my brother Paul, whom I never knew, died of ‘crib death.’ Over the decades, this expectation wore me down.

After my mother died, I kept her spirit, and the spirits of other women in my life at arms length, creating still lives with their belongings. Over time those belongings beckoned. Still, In Motion is my first foray into self-portraiture. Playing dress-up with vintage clothes belonging to women I’ve loved and lost and working with props, like childhood photographs, an old cigarette and a vintage frame, I danced to the other side of grief, emerging in a grove of trees I created during my mother’s final year.

These ritualistic ‘performances’ were a wondrous three-way conversation with my camera, the objects at hand and my grief. Along the way, I processed Mummy and me. She loved to walk alone in the woods, something that made me afraid; I loved to dance, something that made her self-conscious. Mummy read about ‘gutsy gals;’ I wanted to be one. Through it all, we are still, in motion. She’s becoming one with the soil; I’m becoming me.

: Purple Silk Dresses

: Still Life, Hydrangeas

: Pam’s Sofa

: Wondering

: Nana’s Suitcase

: Vintage Linens

: Mummy’s Games

: Dancing 1

: Gram’s Fur

: Dancing 2

: Dancing 3

: Letting Go

: Feeling the Wind

: Dancing Dresses

: Still, in Motion

: Rock On

: Done

About

Lyn Swett Miller is a micro-climate photographer happiest mucking around with the detritus of her life. While investigating compost, landfills and other aspects of our material world, she creates visual meditations on the power of regeneration, transformation and renewal.

Miller lives in Hanover, NH where she has spent the past fifteen years trying to figure out what it takes for a suburban family of four to live sustainably. She is a founding member of the Sustainable Hanover Committee and has found a voice for her activism through photography. Over time, compost became her muse and metaphor.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Miller is an art history graduate from Harvard College with an MBA and a Masters in Teaching. Miller’s first solo show, “Compost Compositions,” was in 2019. Since then, her work has been in numerous juried exhibitions throughout the United States. Her most recent solo exhibition, “Compost: Muse & Metaphor,” was at WinCam at The Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts (Fall 2022).