HOW TO KEEP TIME

The body of work is in response to a finite timeline, with expansive moments prior and following.

Centered on walking with my father, a photographer, towards his death, the project weighs the transactions of energy, humans, and sense making. It is represented by photographs, and installations, with flat work and a photonovel for intimate reading. The project contains heartbreak, teamwork and dancing when one can no longer walk, and the inevitable renewal. Working with an art practice based in care, control and curiosity, the project is in consideration of the gifts of those who choose to participate.

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As the news sank in. I walked. That is what we do: we walk. From the turn of February to March 2025, and as we waited for the diagnosis, my sister and I joined to become a hippocampus. Ever the force, she was the winged horse, making appointments and connections. Myself, the deep sea creature, held space, listened, and turned to the tools I carried with me as the primary care giver. With time, I began to photograph, a skill taught by my father, his father before him, his grandmother, and great grandmother. The promise of his death was announced with a timeline of three to six months. I worked within the ways we both knew how, to make a project that would be bigger than us. 

There are multiple components to this work. First as a documentation of a man moving towards, through, and after death. As a photographer, he had captured every moment that occurred to him. Thus, as the cancer crept through the body, there was never a moment denied.

Second, this agreement set the stage for the community that participated. Many, if not all, had been photographed by the dying man. While some sucked in their breath in hesitation, ultimately acceptance of the project was understood. Images contain disarray and complications of every day in the brillant light of California. 

Third,  is the sense making process, primarily landscapes that speak to the emotional, intellectual, or logistical. They counterbalance human actions as synthesized organizations of space that speak as loud as a sentence. It relies on the viewer to rest in knowing without knowing. This practice had evolved from our family's heritage of dowsing for photographs. A meditative process of emptying the self, to allow images to make themselves apparent as one photographed. Sense making moves from being a vessel to be filled, to the engagement of making as thinking.

Fourth contains the shift from witness, to caregiver, daughter, artist moving within the death experience. I begin to enter the frame. This was no small act. The practice of watching, moved me from disassociated ghost to acknowledging my caregiving role  in front of the camera. The process of choosing to release my life responsibilities and promising to be present till the end, began within 24 hours of the doctor’s proclamation. Watching my own relationship to self-awareness and outcome is a parallel arching theme. It took weeks to comprehend what I was doing, and then to connect the work to the body to the self. Fantasy held a protective layer for weeks. The recursive nature of photography circumvents the original disassociative experience. The objectivity of the camera supports slow digestion, while actively hold up the magical with the real.

Fifth, in the last weeks I began to circle towards creating a portrait studio to record the actors who, no matter how small, played a pivotal role in the play called death and life.

He died on Father’s day, June 15 2025, 5:26 pm in the evening light.  My sister’s husband graciously gave full reign of his green house to become a portrait studio. The seeds choose the day after death to pull themselves out of the soil. As the fertile space evolved, it was here that I began to exercise control, care, and curiosity. The space, a terriarum of my mind, was also a multi-species collaboration, an installation with multiple agents.

There are two rooms, a front entrance with slats that create shadows and map across the space. The back is a glass house, with two tables, a broken window, frogs and spiders. I cleaned a collection of pots made by a friend of the family, abandoned vessels that had been dispersed across the small farm. I planted seeds with my niece and waited for growth.

Back in the role of witness, I would place the camera on a tripod. Humans were invited to choose where they wanted to stand around the threshold between the two spaces. Nurses from hospice, to friends, and family make up a body in its own right. Humans who helped the future and past are celebrated.

The clustered ceramic pots held possibility, until their inhabitants demanded a purchase to climb. Strings were strung, from the green house tables up through the mullins to create paths for the growing vines to help shade the coming growth. There is a daily request to water the tender plants as they seek their way. The strings are encompassed by spider webs which have picked up loose ends into their webs. The space is visited daily by the small farms inhabitants, the sun moves past, and the cycle begins again. The contained ecosystem, visible from every side, full of creatures with their own agenda and unknowns. 

The body of work is called How to keep time.