In the spring of 2025, I spent several weeks at an art residency in southern France. The landscape was stark and stratified—rocky limestone soil, scrubby pine forests, rosemary thickets, and olive groves. When I arrived, it was poppy season. I became fascinated by the poppy’s contradictory nature: delicate and short-lived, yet resilient enough to withstand the intense sun and the sudden Mistral winds that sweep through the region in late spring and summer. The poppy also has a curiously human presence; its translucent petals feel almost like skin—fragile to the touch yet capable of enduring sun, heat, and wind. When dried, their surfaces suggested a kind of map, and so I endeavored to create a kind of map of this place.

The poppy carries a long and varied symbolic history, most commonly associated with remembrance. I’m drawn to the idea that landscapes hold traces of those who have passed through them, and that our presence, in turn, leaves quiet and lasting impressions on the land. During my time there, I cultivated a record of this experience by engaging in multiple iterations of looking—photographs, constructed still lifes, layered paper collages, and other experimental studies that explored both the floral forms and the essence of the terrain that held them.

The layers of the surrounding landscape mirror the shifting perspectives and experiences that unfold within a single moment, while the poppy’s still, fleeting presence marks an intersection between the natural world and its human observers. In the end, the combination of these two kinds of images becomes a kind of map of memory—both shifting and eternal—a visual distillation of my brief encounter with this particular place in this particular time.

Giclée prints, Hahnemühle Fine Art Pearl
Editions of 10 + 2 AP
20×24”

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