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 through spontaneous work with the camera. Each photograph is a rendering of something unique about what lies just beyond boundaries of perception and the subjective experience of time.
The series continues my interest in exploring familiar landscapes as layered sites where memory, temporality, and perception fold together in records of light. The scale invites the viewer into this experiential register, echoing the way landscape both envelops and outlasts the human gaze.
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.
24 × 15” on Hahnehuhle Metallic
40 × 25"” on Hahnemuhle Metallic
Editions of 10+2AP
Inquiries: shelley@shelleykirkwood.com