Winter Gardens

The ambrotypes of Winter Gardens are a tribute to the rich and varied artwork of my female ancestors. In the rural New England culture I grew up in, women ran households, raised children, cooked, cleaned, canned – silent Penelopes at their looms fading into history as the world told and retold the story of Odysseus: men home from wars, home from jobs at the end of the day, home from travels.

I've spent years collecting remnants from the lives of these women, hoping to find the details of their lives. I find an occasional diary or recipe book, the odd postcard or letter. There are tin measuring cups, egg beaters, knives or favorite teacups – very rarely a sketch or painting. Most of what I've found has been needlework: embroidery, crocheted antimacassars, tablecloths, dolls clothes, huge wool afghans, delicately tatted handkerchiefs.

Here in these stitches are their stories, their battles, their journeys: long winter nights and short days when the sun never rose high in the sky. A lone woman sitting by a window, or huddled to a lamp; they hold the joys and sorrows, the frustrations and hopes, the untold stories, the unfought fights. The work of the hands a sort of medicine, a bit of beauty in a long, dark season.

Not long into the project I found myself considering my own winter's work, how different and yet the same it is to the work of the women before me. Slogging through the ice and snow between my studio and winter darkroom in the house,
making the plates became a way of enduring the cold days and low light. The plates I was making on fragile black glass comprised my half of the conversation: my work and theirs, both employing hands and patience and historical methods, both a bit frivolous, both a remedy for winter's seeming eternity.

I began using the wet plate collodion process several years ago. I love it when a photographic work can both sanctify its subject and show the maker's hand in some small way. With collodion this is ampified by the fluid and finicky nature of the materials. Making a plate is a sort of a dance that finds its own perfection – an otherwise perfect ambrotype may reveal a thumbprint in its corner, a not exactly square cut glass, a pour which doesn't cover the glass entirely – all signs of its maker, on a particular day, in a particular place, with a particular mindset.