Artist Statement
This series of murmuration collages represents coming together in peace, unity, and collective action during these uncertain times. As part of an artist collaboration with Guns to Gardens Denver, I created images of unwanted guns surrendered by myself and the community using the cyanotype and lumen photographic processes. These are processes that utilize only light, water, and alchemy, much like the garden. The actual guns were cut up and forged into live-giving garden tools, and the photographic images of the unwanted guns were cut up by local students and me into birds to form these murmurations. I hope this work will be healing and uplifting for the community as we come together in harmony with each other and the planet, rather than in tragedy.
With images of gun violence so ubiquitous and even celebrated in American culture, I wanted to create an alternative. As the gun images are cut and collaged, destruction becomes creation through transformation.
The project also becomes a metaphor for transforming both kinds of violence that burden communities: the fast visible violence of guns, and the slow, invisible violence of environmental harm — the pollution, the disinvestment, the incremental erasure — that falls on the same neighborhoods. They cannot be separated, and neither can their healing.
Susan Sontag observed that the language of photography — to load, aim, shoot — mirrors the language of violence. The cameraless cyanotype and lumen processes transcend this: they require only light, water, and alchemy.
Addressing violence against people and the environment requires unified global collaboration. The process of creating these images serves as a meditative practice, enabling us to envision a more harmonious future.
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.