Barrens
Photography
Newfoundland’s barrens: sky, ocean, and forest. A place at once home and unfamiliar after years of living in Montreal, away from the island. Returning and not-quite-returning at the same time. The photographs are large, and the land fills the frame.
They recall nineteenth-century Hudson River School painting in scale and subject, without the same drama of nature overwhelming the figure. The atmosphere here is less intimidation than immersion: a desire to belong, to find a way back into a place I was only beginning to know how to enter again.
Fog runs through the work. Often read as melancholy, it turns almost playful: clouds echo rock, fog erases the horizon, and wind shows only in the lean of trees. The pictures are thick with texture: snow-laden branches, grassy hills, faceted cliffs, the rippled surface of the sea. Others ask for a longer look, for what sits just beyond the weather.
In some frames I place a figure in the land to play with our relationship to it, seen from behind. Unlike the tiny staffage of Hudson River School canvases, these bodies fit the scale around them. A sweater’s pattern nearly meets the horizon; a camouflage hat takes the palette of the shore. People and place share a footing, briefly. The work opened the questions that followed, and led me into photographing resettled communities.
