Maple Pass, Washington, 2022.
Untitled (Pseudotsuga menziesii, Whistler, B.C.)
From my work in progress, All Born of Earth Have a Common Direction. Which was awarded Magenta Foundation's Flash Forward Emerging Photographers, in 2019.
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned. Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust. A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew, A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost. The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,— They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve. More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world. Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
- Dirge Without Music, by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Completed in 1974, the Shaw House can be grouped with what the architectural writer Richard Olsen has called the Big Sur “bridge timber” houses (1,2). These were built out of reclaimed redwood timber sourced from local bridges that were demolished and replaced with concrete and steel in the 1960s. (The lumber for the Shaw House came from the old Dolan Creek Bridge, located just south of the Esalen Institute, the storied human potential movement retreat center.)
Robert Davidson - Now Is the Time
Tristan Casey. Our shepherd, Cub, holding still for my 4x5.
Anthony Esteves’s “Soot House”.
In the past year I’ve completed an apprenticeship in arboriculture and have started working with a residential builder on Bowen Island. Working with wood has taken a parallel interest to photography as my work has increasingly begun to focus on the forest / north-west landscape. While having done some construction work in the past, it was ultimately finding the work of artist J.B. Blunk that has brought me to where I’m currently at. J.B.’s work had an organic aesthetic akin to that of the oceans manipulation on a fallen tree; far-changed from it’s origin, but ultimately true in it’s changed form. Cabin/House building and chainsaw-woodwork have become daily rituals in the past year and I look forward to merging these mediums with photography into a body of work. The following are reference links for builders and wood-workers whose work has greatly inspired me of late. Many of them are from Northern California. - J.B. Blunk - Jay Nelson - Anthony Esteves - Ido Yoshimoto - Kieran Kinsella
“ Once I twisted my ankle and had to rest with my foot up for a day or two. Eleanor brought me stacks of books and lots of tea. I started at the top of the pile and simply read. That evening she came into the cabin to chat with me, wondering what subject matter was filling my head. We talked and talked. At the end of our time together, she hugged me and said, “See, you need intellectual time. You’re so interesting, given a chance.“ I knew what she was getting at, though we never talked about it explicitly. I had brought to the commune a real anxiety around responsibility. How could it be otherwise given my years of life as a single mother? And look at all the jobs there were to do . . . “ - Judith Plant, Culture Gap
Mark Ruwedel, Westward the Course of Empire.
“ ... most New World settlers arrived from pastoral places long since cleared for agriculture and grazing land, and a boundless treescape thriving with unfamiliar people and animals was a shock. It wasn’t just the continents scale they found so overwhelming, but its dense and endless secrecy: the forest is an introverted wilderness, and it offers risk and refuge in equal measure. Robin Hood found sanctuary there, but so did Red Riding Hood’s Wolf (who in the end, was killed by a woodcutter). While armies of empires dominate the open plain, rebels and patriots gain advantage in the shelter of trees—right beside outcasts, outlaws, and mystics. The woods provide food and building materials, and yet they also disorient and impede progress. Until relatively recently, North American staple-food species like deer, elk, bison, and caribou inhabited the forest from coast to coast, but so did wolves, bears, and mountain lions, creatures that continue to fascinate, terrify—and kill us—to this day. “ - John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce
Long reads that have greatly impacted me: 1491 - Before Columbus arrived and those who followed, North America's population was greater than Europe's. While the hemisphere appeared raw and untouched, there's a good chance that it was being terraformed; from the Great Plains being cleared with fire to create a Buffalo Game Reserve to the infertile Amazon being densely grown to become the worlds largest orchard. A developing perspective that the 'New World' could have been succeeding at an alternate journey with the planet, up until 1492. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/ The Uninhabitable Earth - David Wallace-Wells article on how the planet; it’s resources, temperature and people are all a ticking time bomb due to our vast industrial and technological expansion gives Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ a run for it’s money as the most terrifying post apocalyptic story that I’ve ever read. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html
“ I left Jan trying to sketch the thunderbird, and the other two picking up old blue trading beads; and worked my way through the nettles to a burial tree that I had spotted right back of the village. It was an immense fir, seven or eight hundred years old—so old that nothing could amaze it any more. Streamers of lichen dripped grey from bark and branches. Century after century it had stood there watching the fortunes of the little village at its feet. Had it rejoiced with them in the good times—times of plenty? Wept with them in the bad times—times of battle and famine? Or had it merely held their dead more lightly or more tightly as required? There were nine or ten boxes still up there, clasped in it’s gnarled branches. Perhaps the old tree’s clutch was growing feeble, or perhaps it was too old to care—for when I stepped round its base to the other side, three blood-stained skulls lay there on the ground. I shrank back in horror... but making myself look again, saw that it was only dye off the burial blankets. After lunch we rowed across to the burial islands. When tree burial was forbidden by the government the natives took to putting their dead on special burial islands, piling up the boxes in small log shelters through which the wind could blow. Each family or crest had its own island. The first one we landed on belonged to the wolf crest - a great running wolf thirty feet long, made of boards and painted white, with red and blue extra eyes and signs, stood guard over the dead of his family. On the other island, a killer whale proclaimed that the dead of his family lay there. “ - M. Wylie Blanchet, The Curve of Time