Photo credit Manfred Baumann

I have never had a difficult time writing an artist statement but this particular effort eludes me. I keep wanting to draw the connection between a sense of melancholy or longing and the desperate expanse of the desert. I keep wanting to comment on the feminine energy I feel vibrating off the sand; the rolling dunes in their feminine likeness. The sand skates across the surface of them like us on the earth during our short time here. The way the wind pools and cyclones in the ears before bouncing off the eardrum; particles drifting into every opportunity of space; the sand taking on every shade of orange, red, yellow, even blue before nightfall overwhelms it and the baby gazelles come out sprinting toward their mothers and camels lazily wait for their next instruction. Or across the world in a stateside desert the sand blinding white, coaxing me to walk forward into the abyss; the long forgotten end of it too far to wander to or the one so close to my home in the West – It calls to me and I greet it with a “knowing„ like an old friend that knows all your secrets and smiles at your homecoming like a warm summer sunrise.

So I suppose it is less about the display of a photograph to urge you to feel something than it is my display of my memories over the past two years where my soul has craved hearing the secrets the desert might whisper to me. That I wanted the exposure to it in some way so as to stay tethered to that dreaming, hypnotic state it evokes. Walking endless stretches of rippled dunes at times with others and most times alone, I took moments to capture the sand in looking how I was feeling; like the dunes took the form of my heart or the other way around; it‘s unapologetic depiction of how furiously life can ebb and flow. I admire it, envy it and run towards it while also being completely and utterly afraid of it all at once. Maybe this is, in essence, my leaning in to a pervasive vulnerability I am becoming more fond of as the years come.