Becoming Indigenous

I live on unceded Schaghticoke, Munsee Lenape, Wappinger and Mohican people’s land on a small, wooded plot adjacent to 55+ acres of forested land. This forest continues to be my muse.

As I’ve adapted to living in this place, becoming familiar with the landscape, I’ve been trying to imagine the ways of the native people whose land I now occupy. How did they interpret their surroundings? How could my body/mind encapsulate this via photographic materials?

Through this mindset, I am trying to gain an understanding of the place I inhabit, its histories, myths, and stories along with trying to gain an understanding of the materials I work with as a photographer.

In that spirit, I attempt to tap into the mind of the land while also allowing the photographic materials (deposits of chemicals on paper) with which I am working to enter that same space. With the forested light, bodily movements in concert with the mind, create the images.

These works are chemigrams made with second (or third) use natural/botanical homemade developers on donated expired photographic paper. They recall the forest, the trees, the hillsides, the rocks and the mind of the land that surrounds me as I attempt to become indigenous.