TANGLED
In 2017, I had a heart attack. My doctor told me that it was a significant heart attack and I spent days recovering in the hospital’s cardiac unit. But I didn’t really grasp the seriousness of the event at the time. After a few weeks it dawned on me that it could very well have been a fatal event. I began thinking about the “what-ifs”, which soon turned to obsessive thoughts about life and death and what it all meant.
Realizing that I needed to focus on life in the here and now, I started photographing again at some local woodlands. I became fascinated with the bare trees covered with gnarled vines. I perceived an anatomical visual quality to them that I wanted to try to explore further. The twists and tangles of the vines and branches seemed analogous to the chaos in my head. They became forms to contemplate, puzzles to solve, maps to decipher, and iconography to translate - a way to process the thoughts on mortality that occupied my mind. Slowing down to closely examine these vines through photographing them, processing the images and finally making the prints, helped me to untangle my thoughts. The gestures of the trees brought me into a place in which I could explore my feelings and resolve issues. These photographs are documents of that process.
