This work is a visual iteration of a morning-pages practice: a set of impressions shaped by the intersections of memory and time during daily walks in the forest near my home. Guided by attention rather than control, the process is rooted in presence and exchange, yet open to chance and spontaneity. Each photograph becomes an act of collaboration with the more-than-human world and an attempt to render something unique about what lies beyond perception.
As my practice has evolved, these images have grown into Understory, a series of ultra large-scale giclée prints that explore familiar landscapes as layered sites where memory, time, and perception fold together in records of light. The scale invites the viewer into this experiential register, echoing the way a landscape can envelop or outlast us.
Using extended exposures, I draw on photography’s capacity to compress duration into a single frame. In doing so, I tap into the medium’s historical lineage while also expanding it: the atmospheric sensibility of earlier traditions, such as Pictorialism, as well as suggestions of painterly traditions such as Luminism and Romanticism, intersect with the immediacy and material awareness of contemporary process-driven practice.
54 × 84” on Hahnehuhle Metallic Paper
Editions of 5 +2AP
Inquiries: shelley@shelleykirkwood.com