Reverence: Portraits of Natures Mortes is a photographic series that highlights the details of the natural world, primarily from the mountains and wild that surround where I live in Colorado, with the occasional piece from travels elsewhere.
This work is a creative and spiritual practice of noticing the often overlooked, of spending time with it. It is a practice of seeing with intention, openness and curiosity.
In each of these natures mortes (still life artworks) there is a silent story. How did they come to bear the textures and weathered marks, the hints of life and death? Ancient stones. Sun-bleached bones. Remnants of a being that has come to rest. What are in these silent stories? What do you see, feel and come to understand within them?
Reverence is the challenging work of being present, noticing and revering the simple that surrounds us.
It’s work that started as long ago as 2004, when I started collecting pieces of nature, feeling connected to the pieces but with no “project” in mind. Those pieces eventually would lead to Reverence. I started photographing and intentionally putting together the series in 2018.
I have exhibited collections of this work in galleries since 2020, most recently in March 2023 at the Kinder Padon Gallery at the Center for the Arts in Crested Butte, Colorado.
{Un}Reverence is an extension of the Reverence series. With this companion series, I’ve collected and photographed human-made objects left in the natural world.
{Un}Reverence, effectively, is the anti-Reverence. It examines these objects and their potential stories, as pulled from forests and mountains, creek banks and sea shores.
It considers what it means for humans to live as part of the natural world. And, maybe more specifically, what it means to be Americans doing so.
River Rocks is an ongoing photographic collection featuring rocks I gather from the river where I live in Colorado. They are part of a series I started in fall 2022, and a project in which I’m pairing poetry with the images.