The images in Thresholds emerged from long, unhurried walks as a pilgrimage and a listening practice. Along the way I made photographs on film and digitally, then returned to the studio to build small temporary altars in homage to what I encountered. Some prints are housed in shadow boxes alongside plants, stones and fragments of manmade material that masquerade as natural, gathered from the walks and from rummage bins. Building something small and devotional out of what was gathered is my way of understanding a photograph as a relationship that continues after the shutter closes. Photographed again, the altars and the landscapes begin to trade places and it sometimes becomes indiscernible which images are vast terrain and which are tabletop assemblages a few inches across.

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The work asks for slowness. What do we pass each day without noticing? How long do these objects live alongside us and what do they take from or offer to the places they inhabit? Many of the sites I photograph have endured for centuries and now face fire, flood and rising heat intensified by climate change. The images ask the viewer to slow down enough to notice what they ordinarily pass and in that noticing, to feel tender and implicated.

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My approach is to arrive with each step, listen intently and meet each place with care. I draw on ways of knowing that center reciprocity and kinship with land and water, a debt to Indigenous knowledge systems that never stopped understanding land as kin. The camera becomes a tool for pausing at thresholds, where past and present, atavistic and immediate meet within each image and altar.

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The images are a kind of return to the primordial through enchanted pathways. Guided by an animist ethos, the work honors the sacredness and sentience of elemental matter. Seen with care, the images become numinous and permeable, cloaked in an uncanny aura that gestures toward awe and the sublime. Fear moves people to look away; enchantment moves them closer and closeness is where care begins.

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Through them, the distance to the deep ancestral past begins to dissolve.