Although as a photographer I photograph both travel and my daily world, the landscape that is at the heart of my work is that of the new Universe. In the past cosmology was at the heart the culture’s expression. For the most part, our current culture and cosmology are worlds apart and I find that strange. Most folks—aside from images from the Hubble—know more about ancient cosmology than current. And, that current view of the Universe and its beginning is a story that is so new that it is still in process being written.
We are even divorced from the night sky. It takes a national disaster or major blackout to have a clear view of the stars. On the other hand, using a telescope and computer cameras, that sky can be viewed like never before. Star clusters, galaxies and nebula can be viewed in a specular manner.
The Universe is also a landscape of the invisible, dark matter and dark energy, making up a major part. The cosmic microwave background can be heard—the phone company discovered it as phone noise—more than seen. Life is everywhere and probably showered down on our early planet. Planets also are common although we are only in the process of developing the technology to see them.
My work is an abstraction of this Universe. I look for common objects which when reproduced might represent this landscape. At the heart of my process I delight in using the cyanotype—one of the earliest forms of photography, discovered in 1842 by an astronomer—and combine those cyanotypes with printmaking.
My art almost always employs a collaboration of multiple processes. Typically, one of my finished pieces might well draw upon collographs, 19th century cyanotype chemistry, 20th century darkroom negatives, 21st century digital negatives, and photo-polymer plates and screen printing along its path to completion. These individual processes are inextricably bound together in the finished image. Each process interacts chemically or physically (or both) with all the others, and altering the sequence in which they are introduced into the process markedly affects the final result. Along the way, each medium both gives, and gives up, some qualities by which it is separately defined. The resulting art pushes the boundaries and borders of each and, I would hope, pushes the boundaries of the exploration of the Universe itself.