Artist Statement
I believe in the power of art to heal communities. This project is a meditation on coming together in peace, unity, and collective action.
Having been on both ends of a gun, I have felt helpless terror and the illusion of protection. When I suddenly inherited guns, I knew I had an opportunity to use them for a more important purpose.
This project is created in collaboration with Guns to Gardens Metro Denver. Guns to Gardens is working to end gun violence by creating safe disposal events for guns. They also work with artists and blacksmiths to create garden tools from the destroyed guns, and have invited me to create a photographic project.
With images of gun violence so ubiquitous and even celebrated in American culture, I wanted to create an alternative. I have created analog images of guns surrendered by me and the community that are also then cut up into birds by me and Students Demand Action. They are then reimagined into collages of murmuration formations of birds in flight. As the gun images are cut and collaged, destruction becomes creation.
The murmuration images represent coming together in peace instead of tragedy. The project also becomes a metaphor for the fast and slow violence to the environment and communities being transformed into something life-giving and healing as we persist in an era of uncertainty.
Violence is common in our society’s language and shared in the language we use for photography: to load, aim, and shoot (reference to Susan Sontag.) By using the cyanotype and lumen photographic processes, it transcends this language and uses only light, water, and alchemy – much like a garden.
In order to overcome the collective violence we are doing to each other and the planet; only unified, global collaboration can create change. By creating these images, it becomes a meditative way for me to imagine a better world.
For all the womxn who have been murdered or assaulted and not made the news, I remember you today. For all who have been hurt by those in positions of power either in their own home or elsewhere, for those long since forgotten due to your skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or class. Too many to list. This project is dedicated to you.