My life has been made from plants: lupins and birches, lilacs and maple trees; an endless textbook where under every latin name I could write a story, perhaps small and commonplace like a sprout of purslane. Among those hearty green sprouts, there would be rare ladyslippers of happenings— magical and protected.
I sift through my memories like walking through old forests, damp and mystical, marked by the voice of my father, my mother, her father, pointing out every few meters some shaggy bark of a hickory or a bright orange fungi nestled in the undergrowth.
Growing up with a family of plant pathologists, our family slideshows were sprinkled with the documentary photos typical in scientific research. They were snapshots of plants dug up, cleaned, and resting on white backgrounds, diseased or having suffered from strained growth periods.
This was not my family's sole interest in growing things. My parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles were all intensive gardeners. We ate from the land and my brother and I never considered that most people had to buy all their fruits, vegetables, or flowers-- or that others may not have pantries full of canned things their mothers had taken the time to preserve after the growing season. We were products of the children of depression-era parents, who simultaneously worked the land for their own sustenance and researched ways to avoid disease or improve the growth of their plants.
These photographs have taken form of my own exploration of myself. I have become obsessed with their differing shapes and process of decay-- their root structures as they relate to their foliage. They have become these tiny precious foetae which upon examination, contain mystery and darkness, but also complexity and elegance. They are both an ode to my beginning, and a meditation on, or a realisation of the beauty of decay, and of impermanence.
The sensibilities my parents taught me of the scientific process aided me in taking these pictures. It is a process and a way of photographing I have utilised in my work, for instead of recording results in a log or an excel sheet, I have the images as visual records. These are my attempts at bridging whatever gap there may be between my parents' world of scientific research and mine of artistic exploration. It is an ode to my family and their work as well as my own attempt to prove that we, as well as our seemingly separate worlds have significance as they exist together.
This series has been a process of coming-to-terms with my upbringing—my growing up in the countryside of rural Ohio, a place I'd been running from and a part of myself I had been denying for the past five years. It was not my initial intention, but through creating this project, I have been completely immersed in and excited by that part of my being. Not only am I examining the plants with care, their process of decay and the shape of the parts of their structures that make their whole, but I am also slowly unearthing the sensibilities of my family within myself.
It is more and more apparent to me that we cannot escape where we are from and who we come from. These are aspects of our person that are inextractable, whether they surface in obvious ways or not.