Dwelling: Expressions of Time

The past is not dead.
In fact, it’s not even past.
—William Faulkner

 Dwelling: Expressions of Time is a series of photographs that unfolded while walking the hardwood forests of my new home in Northeast Connecticut. I expected a landscape familiar from my childhood on the southern edge of the Laurentide Ice Sheet in the mid-Atlantic region. However, I found something different in the cliché images of New England stonewalls, cellar holes, abandoned fields, and millraces. I felt lives lived in these clues from the past and set about to unravel the social and economic history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life based on the landscapes of small-scale agriculture and light industry.

Earlier, people found ways to sustain life tied to this glaciated landscape of landforms crisscrossed by a network of rivers and streams that are foreign to us now. Yet in these woods, just a short walk away, lie memories of other times stacked like geologic strata just below the surface, often overlooked as we go about the everyday. The research helped me understand the artifacts I was finding while I sought a visual form that would evoke this physical, biotic, and human blending of histories. My analog-digital hybrid process, beginning with Polaroid film and ending with an archival pigment print on rag paper, suggests the layers of past and present I feel walking the landscape of Southern New England.