Photographs turned into negatives create a cyanotype of bubbles frozen and fresh, ice, and moons mingled with seafoam, candles and glass. From hot to cold, everything relates to and emits light at different frequencies. Holding the center is a gathering of pinyon pine pitch (sensitively and legally harvested on BLM land), which has been known over centuries to heal, bind, and bring clarity.

Matter is memory, and memory is a medium. As I photograph specimens in wild and cultivated spaces, I capture a brief version of their existence that I transmute into a negative and then into a cyanotype. Grouping them together across ecosystems and scales and then affixing them with sun and water, the unseen-but-sensed energetic field is illumined. With the aid of botanical tea generosity, a warm brown envelops the native blue of the cyanotype process. At its heart, six dried wildflowers yearn.

Nearly 70 individual, hand-cut negatives of photographs I have taken builds the compositional structure of this large cyanotype. A dense configuration of birds, moths, moons, bubbles, feathers, shells, woven pine needles and gesturing hands are held in a hex by porpoise jaw bones and glass rods. The center is anchored by a dried earthstar mushroom I collected, not a picture but a real specimen. I finished the edges with hand-shaped walnut whose tone has been shifted with a millennia’s-old technique of ebonizing using natural materials.

A circlet of flowers, made from species living in Southern California. I found each while hiking the expanse our rich and biodiverse region. I turn each photo into a negative that is printed on film and then carefully cut out. The negatives are placed on paper that has been coated with a light-sensitive fluid and then placed in the sun. I bathe each photograph in a botanical tea which shifts the blue tone to brown, before applying nature-based paints.

The photographic aspect of this work is composed from nearly 30 photos of birds I have taken during my travels from desert to mountain to coast. I turn the pictures into negatives that are printed on film and then cut out. The negatives are placed on paper that has been coated with a light-sensitive fluid and then placed in the sun. I bathe the cyanotype in a botanical tea which shifts the natural blue to brown. This work is a neutral-potent incantation related to taking flight, ascension, and shifting realms.