project statements
| PROJECT STATEMENTS |
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| IN COTTON coming soon *this project is made possible with support from the Creative and Performing Arts Grant Program at the University of South Carolina. INTO THE FLATLAND In the fall of 2001, I relocated from New Mexico to the Mississippi Delta to live on my family's farm, Belle Chase. I ate from my great-grandmother's china, drank form her crystal and slept in her bed. At dusk I rocked on the porch and watched the blackbirds descend on the canebrake planted by my great-grandfather. Living on the farm I existed in a strange continuum. My family's history and their connection to this place were markedly present in my everyday experience.I left Belle Chase in 2003 to take a teaching position at the University of South Carolina. Into the Flatland explores familial obligation and our conflicted relationship with "home." The photographs in this series were made during regular trips home to visit family over a period of several years. I chose to leave the Delta for many of the same reasons anyone ever chooses to leave a rural area. This is land that my family has inhabited for generations, and I am pulled to this place in a way that I am not able to fully articulate. It is not my nostalgia alone that creates this longing; it is that of my mother and my mother's mother. *This project was made possible with support from the Institute for Southern Studies and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Carolina. |