Being with My Sun

On sunny days, a beam of sunlight projects through the window of my son Lucas’ bedroom. It arrives around 11am, and slowly works its way across the room until about 3pm. In the years after Lucas’ death, I began communing with this light beam, watching it move and light up the unsettling stillness of this space. I am mesmerized by how it illuminates the accumulating dust settling on his things and floating up into the air I breathe. Using an array of pinhole cameras, I engage in a silent conversation with this room, with his things, and with the power of the vibrant sun. I am inviting the unexpected; the sun and the photographic paper conspire to reveal compositions I could never predict. Some of these images have drawings of flowers cut into the surface with a blade.

Over the last couple of years I have lingered in preserved bedrooms of iconic historic house museums, making photographs with a handmade pinhole camera in the weeks before a NO SLEEPING performance.