DEBRIS ABSTRACTIONS
For this series of photographs, I was inspired by the way sunlight illuminated leaves and debris that I noticed while hiking in the Rocky Mountains. I picked up those objects and brought them into my studio to try and recreate the light I had seen. I discovered that by carefully manipulating the objects in front of my camera, I could work with the objects as if I were painting a canvas. This allowed me to explore the formal elements of shape, line, value, color, and texture in ways that abstracted the objects to create a new visual reality.
Since that first encounter on the trail, I have collected similar objects from all over, discarded or ignored, natural or man-made, to transform them into something different in my studio. I am intrigued by the way that some objects, insignificant or unattractive in one setting, can be reborn as new objects when viewed in a different context.