Evolutionary Road

I know I kept saying this time it’s different, that I’ll get it together and start writing again like a writer should write; that I’ll start producing work on a regular basis again. And for a time, that was true. Like many artists, I enthusiastically swam out past the surf and then wasn’t sure how to get back to shore.

I started out a couple of years ago, pricked by a feeling surrounding me of almost giddy resignation and hopelessness about the world and human life and in reaction, started work on Undying World. With the 2016 election, with what has felt like a continual disintegration of civil liberties, social reform, and American sanity, I realized that the country I thought I was living in was an illusion and my work had to go in a different direction. But I was working.

But not long after I made my last post, my mother got sick. And then she died. And everything just stopped for a while.

When I started climbing back to the surface, I wanted to address that loss somehow. I took a long road trip through the American West back to my mother’s first and last home in Oklahoma. I didn’t have a clear understanding what I wanted to pull from the trip. And maybe that was best; to go into the wilderness without a direction. As I wandered through a natural world that is undying, interwoven with an America so radically changed from my childhood, it was at once a stepping up to meet personal sorrow and my own personal place in time, and a long hard stare at a country maybe I didn’t know, and a passionately dispassionate observation of the west which is home.

I am working again, merging the the past few years into a strange tapestry. It’s impossible to display properly here, but eventually, I’d like to have the images stitched together in a single long strip, if that isn’t a bit too much on the Kerouac nose. I’m working from the gut, as opposed to having a well-lit path, which just means everything is subject to change. But I’m happy to be swimming out into the surf again.

Too many mixed metaphors? Anyway, to catch up…

 

Coming soon… The real road trip shots that underpin a lot of this work: Three weeks, twelve states, and no air conditioning.