NATURE AS INTERIOR LANDSCAPE

Home is the mountains of Western North Carolina. I love the landscape that surrounds me, its beauty and its complexity, its seasons and its moods. Inspired by this outer landscape, I discover through my camera lens, who I am in my interior landscape.

My approach to photography has been shaped by my years as a psychotherapist. I came to understand that we don't experience life as a single exposure — we overlay the past with the present, the imagined with the actual, memory with sensation. What we perceive in any moment is already a composite. I now have the pleasure of making that layered awareness visible through my photography.

It is this awareness of layered meaning that draws me to multiple exposures, intentional camera movement, and composites — techniques that resist a single, fixed reading of an image. I want a photograph to hold more than one truth, the way a moment of experience does. I seek to create images that go beyond the objective mind and encourage subjective experiences, where the viewer asks not only “what is this about?” but “how does this make me feel?” I shamelessly want to evoke feeling. The experience of the image is the goal.

My love affair with photography began over three decades ago, honed through workshops, mentorship, study of the masters, and a great deal of experimentation. Along the way I found my own visual language in composites and in the ever-shifting nature of time, light, ice, water, and reflections.

I have exhibited in solo, group, and juried gallery shows throughout Western North Carolina, and led photography workshops and tours around the country, including ten years co-leading with Earthsong Photography. I have co-taught for Road Scholar at the Intentional Growth Center at Lake Junaluska, NC; the Arrowmont School for Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN; and the Appalachian Barn Alliance in Madison County, NC. My book, The Interbeing Project: The Interface of Woman and Nature, was published alongside my exhibit of the same name at aSheville Museum in 2015.