SOMETHING GOOD

Over the past two years, my overall practice has evolved into an investigation of what binds people to place. I’ve been interested in how we manufacture and reinforce community and belonging through moments of celebration, vulnerability, and secular ritual. At the same time, I’ve been parsing through what does or doesn’t continue to tie me to the rural localities and forested Appalachian foothills of my own childhood. 

Something Good began as a sort of simple interlude—a necessary breath during the festival off-season, where I could escape into the guilty pleasure of strictly aesthetic landscape. As I worked, I began to think more deeply on what these landscapes signify for me. There’s a dissonance in my mind that I can’t get over, where I feel like an outsider in the locations I came from while the trees and hills and ledges there still feel more like mine than any other place. I decided to visit and photograph multiple areas of Ohio, including those I grew up in, the ones I live in now, and any others I felt aesthetically drawn to. The final mix of images are not to be labelled individually and speak to the beauty and comfort I can find if I look for it anywhere in my state. In the end, this project is part grief, part love letter, and part stubborn persistence in claiming a new definition of a home landscape for myself, without any rules but my own.