what stirs beneath, what shines above

What stirs beneath, What shines above

Beneath the forest floor, fungal networks extend in vast, interconnected webs, trading nutrients with tree roots in relationships that predate humans. Above, light filters through leaves in shifting patterns, triggering the photosynthetic cycle that converts solar energy into living tissue.

The photographic based prints included in What stirs beneath, What shines above explore the quiet intelligence of forests through camera-less and lens based photographic processes that allow plants, light, and chemistry to author their own images. The photographic prints become collaborations with non-human makers.

These images result not in representations of nature but rather from direct collaboration with it -plant matter pressed against silver salts, chlorophyll coaxed to leave its impression, botanical extracts intermingling with chemically light-sensitive surfaces, iron minerals responding to wavelengths the human eye cannot perceive - traces of actual exchange, documents of real encounters between photons, pigments, and metallic compounds.

Through chlorophyll prints, chemigrams, cyanotypes and other experimental processes, the images ask us to consider what it means to witness not just with our eyes, but through the responsiveness of matter itself.

This is photography that refuses the instant, that asks for patience, that returns agency to the non-human. What stirs beneath is the slow work of becoming, the networks that constitute the forest’s invisible infrastructure. What shines above acknowledges the solar energy that powers all photosynthesis and, by extension, all photography.

This is slow photography for an impatient age, an attempt to render visible the patient intelligence of ecosystems. In surrendering authorial control to light, plants, time, and chemistry, I hope to make work that records not what I see, but what the forest reveals when allowed to speak in its own photochemical language. These are images made with the nature rather than merely of it.