Here and Then

Here & Then is a collection of 26 artist’s books that explores the story and history of a particular place. This place, Mt. Meigs, Alabama, is a shifting rural community that has acted as homestead to a portion of my family since the mid-1800s. Each book is topical and utilizes a variety of visual and textual information including family photographs and letters, original photographs and text, images collected during research, objects received from home, and artworks created from these materials.

The larger goal of the collection is to investigate the layers of personal and historical, subjective and objective knowledge that make up the character of a particular place. The secondary goal is to achieve this by presenting the information in visual and textual fragments in order to highlight the shifting ways in which we learn and remember. Much of the information appears in multiple books as the shuffling of the information is representative of how the mind experiences and constructs place, acknowledging the complexity and flexibility of the larger picture.