Light-Weight is a series of physical photographic collages about the meeting of the soft and the hard. Each piece is built from two layered photographic prints on Arches aquarelle paper. One image carries an abstract, fluid field of marks; the other holds an image drawn from the natural world. I cut and burn into the upper layer so the abstraction beneath rises through the openings. The work is about the interplay of lightness and weight and the way a thing that flows and a thing that is more solid are often thrown into relationships with each other. The series also explores what happens when nature and the human spirit are held in the same frame. I made the pieces intuitively, and I think the project is finally about mystery and the parts of existence that resist rational explanation.

 

Every piece is made by hand from two photographs that I took. The lower image is an abstraction, a field of marks I find rather than arrange. They are organic and weather-like. Over the base image I place a second photograph from the natural world: water, trees, sand, the ordinary surfaces of a place. Then I cut into that top layer, and sometimes burn through it, opening the surface so the field underneath comes forward through the gaps. What you see is a single image made of two, with its construction left visible. I do not hide the seams. The damage is part of the picture.

 

I did not plan what the series would mean. The meaning arrived in the making, and it keeps returning to one thing: the way the soft and the hard live together. Water and stone. Breath and weight. The fluid element that moves and the resistant element that stays. The cuts and the burns are where the soft layer gives way and the deeper field shows through, which is also, I think, how the spirit tends to surface, through the places where the surface fails.

I think of this as spiritual work. This part of nature does not answer questions. This work offers a transcendental view of nature as a reflection of the human spirit. Rothko served as an inspiration for this work. He wanted his paintings to hold that kind of charged silence. Jerry Uelsmann also showed me that a composite photograph could behave like a dream and still be, undeniably, a photograph. Light-Weight is reaching toward that same hush, the feeling that an image can be a quiet place to stand and experience mystery. Ultimately, I aim for these works to stand as photographic art that pushes the boundaries of what a photograph can be.