Searching for a Sense of Home
I recently moved to a new part of the country, far from what is familiar to me. I have a cozy comfortable house, but for me home extends beyond a house and out into the natural environment. I’ve been roaming around the county with my camera feeling like an outsider — looking for an understanding from the land. Searching for an understanding of how people relate to the land — as a way of redefining home for myself. As I roam, I find myself returning to some places over and over again.

The marshes and pine woods draw me to them because they both beckon and repel. They can be beautiful, fanciful, thorny, and impenetrable all as one. I feel my roots taking hold.

Home Markets
In the developing countries I have visited over the years, I have always been fascinated by the “home” markets on almost every street corner.  People have small stores connected to their homes from which they sell food, beverages, clothing, phone cards, and general supplies.   Selling something out of your dwelling is a popular way to make a living in many places, and it reminds me of the neighborhood “mom and pop” stores in my hometown of Westerly, Rhode Island back in the 1970’s but which are now gone.

Since moving to Lynn, I have been surprised to discover an abundance of similar “home” markets present in the city.   They are also known as convenience stores, mini-marts, and superettes.   Lynn has a huge housing stock of triple-decker houses in often deteriorating condition, and a number of these houses still incorporate a store on the first floor.   Lynn is also home to 70 different nationalities and many of these “home” markets reflect that fact.  The store names and colors tell us that the owners are from other parts of the world:  the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, etc.   Perhaps this is why there are so many satellite dishes attached to these dwellings – people want to watch television from back home!

What is for sale in these Lynn “home markets”?  It varies by market.   Alcohol, scratch tickets and bread and milk are popular in some.  But others emphasize fresh fruit and vegetables, grains and beans, frozen fish, and lots of candy for the kids.   A few are true general stores selling cooking pots, blankets, candles, beauty supplies and many other items.   The reality is that a home market is a much easier place for people especially without cars to shop, rather than riding the bus with bags of groceries.  However, there is a downside – prices are higher than Market Basket of Stop N Shop due to smaller inventories.

Who buys from these “home” markets?  It is usually the people who live in the surrounding neighborhood and can walk to the store or stop in their car on the way home.   The markets are places of community – you actually may know the clerk or owner and the other people visiting the store.   But what fascinates me most is that the majority of these markets are in actual homes.  Are they owner occupied on the 2^nd and 3^rd floors?   Some shopkeepers rent their space, some own and rent out the apartments above, but some do own their “home” market and live there themselves.  Regardless, these buildings are both homes and markets!

Aide-Memoire (An aid to memory)
The exquisite stillness of a garden just before dawn can be magic. I’m drawn to the mystery of shadowed spaces among the clipped forms, and the interplay of light and atmosphere as dawn filters through the trees. I love paying attention to the edges of the garden, where manicured space gives way to unrestrained nature.

I’ve spent a lot of time in gardens over the past two years. One thread that runs through the long history of the garden is the tension between our love of nature and our desire to control it. Nature speaks to something deep within us, and it’s in nature, both cultivated and wild that we have historically found healing, and relief from the cares of daily life.

Everyone experiences a garden differently. Some may see beauty and tranquility, or feel inspired by the intricacies of nature, while others may see nothing but work to be done. Certainly, gardens are layered with meaning, reflecting the perceptions, emotions and biases of the person experiencing it. For me, gardens have always been places of contemplation, providing an aidememoire for long ago natural spaces of my childhood and perhaps memories of loved ones. The human presence that is imposed on a garden, and its cultivated orderliness can be a comfort. But I feel a tug of uncertainty as I wander off a bit, past the clipped forms and edges of the welltended landscape, to the tangled, wilder space beyond.

Just Another Alice
In the series Just Another Alice, I explore the ways that I have coped with the confinement of the pandemic, and the memories of past travels in which I have taken solace.

Memento Vivere: A Study of Life
It is the composition and lighting styles of 17^th century master painters that inspires this image series, which explores the inclusion of the animate in still life. The images, severally and in mutual context, produce a constructed narrative, comprising depth of color and clarity, like that of an oil painting, while also reflecting elements of “memento mori.”  Memento mori: decedent animals — draped or prepared as food — are frequent subjects in 17^th century northern European still-life paintings. This genre of still-life typically features an abundance of food, drink, and the occasional human skull.

Memento mori paintings, like Dutch Realist painter Harmen van Steenwyck’s ‘A Still Life with Dead Birds and Fruit’ (1640), remind the viewer of the brevity and fragility of human life. In Steenwyck’s work, deceased animals lie in dramatic repose, extending limply over the edge of the partially covered and abundantly adorned table. Retaining underlying intent of this distinctive style of still life, I work with live animals in still-life scenes, however, inverting an important part of the meaning: while memento mori reminds viewers of their mortality, memento vivere expresses that life is now, here and in this moment. Viewing still-life images of my domestic fowl- geese, ducks, and chickens, transforms the memento mori into a constructed narrative of memento vivere: remember that you live.

Some Things Remain the Same
Photography has become my therapy, my way to process what I see in the world. I am drawn to people and their environments. I seek to photograph children honestly, in their joy and awkwardness and irritation and boredom. My recent work uses a documentary approach and intentional portraiture to tell the story of my family during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Some Things Remain the Same is an ongoing project documenting my childrens’ experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Home became the center of our lives – for safety, for connection, and for entertainment. We built rocket ships, put teddy bears in our window for neighborhood kids to find, ran through sprinklers, and had a spa day.

Wearing masks, we wandered empty neighborhood streets looking for signs of life and chatted with friends from our front porch. We tried our hand at home haircuts for what will probably be the last time. Zoom fatigue hit hard. And we wondered where to keep our ever growing mask collection.

The Stars of Our Days
Somewhere near the middle of 2020, I interviewed for a position as a ‘farm educator’ at a local farm that raises chickens both for eggs and for educational purposes. In the midst of the pandemic when all that is normal was no longer, anything that allowed me to be outside socializing in person was all of a sudden very appealing. I had some experience in organic gardening,  but really excelled in ‘level of enthusiasm’, and so I was hired.

It has been a wonder to spend part of my days with young children, whose vocabulary now includes things like “hybrid remote”, “social distancing”, “zoom calls” and ‘being exposed”, yet to be with them when they can be free and run around outdoors like kids are supposed to.

Chickens were often the stars of our days. We learned about them, fed and watered them, picked them up, collected their eggs, named them.
I have a new found love for these beautiful and social birds, partly because of the joy they brought to the children, and partly because my eyes were opened to the lively and sweet beings that they are. A pandemic gift to me.

Framingham Farms
Framingham, a Massachusetts city of over 75,000 people, is better known for its shopping malls than its farms. Nonetheless, several Framingham based farms continue to exist despite the ongoing development that gobbles up more available open space each year.

While some of the surviving farms are now protected space, this project is motivated by the prospect that the few others that remain may in time succumb to economic and development pressures, and the desire to preserve them photographically. My goal is to capture visual impressions of these islands of agriculture, as they are now, focusing on the larger forms as well the vital details of the environment, structures, and tools that all together support the cultivation of the land.

Impressions:  Cape Cod
I have always found solace and a spiritual home in nature.  During COVID, I began to really treasure the gift of natural beauty around me during my solo wanderings with camera.

I spend significant time on Cape Cod and particularly cherish the serenity and promise of the early morning light on its shores, ponds, forests and rivers. In this body of work, I utilized intentional camera movement (ICM) and  the blending of multiple  photos to create my personal vision of these landscapes– fleeting and fragile, peaceful and inviting.

The Architect called Light
My project is to explore the idea of Light as an architect, the creator of forms and spaces. American architect Louis Kahn (1901-1974) sensed “Light as the giver of all presences, and material as spent Light. What is made by Light casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light.”

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University was designed in 1962 by Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier (1887-1965), a pioneer of modern architecture.   It is Light, however, that molds the raw concrete building material into beautiful lines and forms.  It is Light that defines the strength of the columns that effortlessly lift the geometric volumes of studio space up off the street level.  And it is Light that leads me inward to a seat of stillness.  My photographic techniques are single and multiple exposures, black and white filters and color shifts offered by the Fuji X4 camera, Lightroom and Photoshop.