Always already made: Landscape of the Tessentee in pinhole photographs, artist's books, and prints

My research project centers on the landscape of the Tessentee Bottomland Preserve near Otto, NC. It is the first property protected from development by the Land Trust for the Little Tennessee (1999). Through this project, I want to look deeply at everyday landscape -- to see what is not immediately revealed and perhaps more importantly, to connect with its mystery, with the paradox of understanding deeply while at the same time knowing that full understanding always lies just beyond our grasp. My study concerns finding the correspondence between personal connections to a place, historical events, distortions in cultural memory, and how these influence experiences of place. My work focuses on the 1940's era silo at the Tessentee preserve. It concerns both what is visible in a place and how an invisible factor, time, is interpreted. I am also more concerned about accurately interpreting how a place feels rather than specifics about how it looks in my work.My artwork consists of three large banners made from the pinhole photographs and eight handmade artist's book incorporating pinhole photographs and prints from the Preserve. An important element of the exhibition relates to the interaction of large, imposing images of the landscape in the form of banners compared to the small, intimate images in books. The largest banner measures six by nine and a half feet. There are five unique artist's book structures and one book produced as a varied edition of three. The editioned book can also be reproduced in this or another format and used as a fund raising tool for the Land Trust for the Little Tennessee. I use the medium of the artist's book to address the idea of an intimate journey through a specific place. Within the books are pinhole photographs and other elements that describe both internal and external relationships to the place through their relationship with each other. The use of prints and pinhole photographs and their organization into a book structure involves a practice that echoes being present at the place and then processing what occurs there by reliving the journey through memory. The book format also lends itself to sharing of the experience.I discuss three artists who were sources of inspiration and whose influences may be seen in my work: Sally Mann, Denise Carbone, and Mu Xin. Mann's contemporary landscape photography uses her relationship with the South to invoke the past as in inescapable aspect of the present. Carbone uses materials and process to create a serendipitous interaction between the two with the result transcending both materials and process. Mu Xin's evocative landscape paintings done in secret during imprisonment in Communist China deal with the survival of memory -- cultural as well as personal -- and how he uses it to escape the inescapable. For these artists landscape provides the ground from which inspiration takes shape -- and their work deals with the internal and external processing of time. We inhabit the landscape yet see ourselves as separate from it but are always already at home within it.