ARTIST STATEMENT
Places once active but no longer populated—ghost towns, abandoned buildings, empty structures, defunct playgrounds, and ancient sites—their ghostly ruins and what remains in various states of decay fascinate me.
However mundane and clichéd they are, I am completely taken with abandoned places. Old cemeteries, too. Entering an abandoned manufacturing plant, hospital, bunker, or old cemetery is like a journey into another world, a world defined by silence and absence. A reminder of the essential ephemerality of human existence. Yet, fragments of past lives persist in the structures. Whispers of untold stories charge the silence of the vacant space.
I love these contradictions and the creative tension they elicit. As liminal landscapes, ruins are suspended betwixt and between—between integrity and dissolution, substance and nothingness. It is this liminality that gives ruins their specific frisson.
Once abandoned, for whatever reason, the site is left to time and nature. Patterns of decay—rusted and moldering forms, broken and weathered stone, peeling paint that reveals layers of history—are truly beautiful. But my lensless camera does not render such detail. Instead, my images explore the dark terrain of the haunting forms. They frame my inner landscape of ambiguous and contradictory emotions conjured by memory of the past and the sight of a world collapsed into rubble and decay, while simultaneously suggesting our own future in the absence.
