The Shepherd's Daughter

In a landscape reminiscent of childhood among animals and hunters forests and changing seasons unending cycles remind us that everything is a matter of life and death. We forget the ways that we are connected to the land until a man dies during the winter and we have to wait for the ground to thaw before we can bury his body. Frozen in artifice, eventually we become the animal. Until then, we wake every morning in ritual and find ways to reconcile what it means to be alive. _________________________________________________________ My work is deeply rooted in my family history. After the death of my mother when I was eleven years old, I became increasingly curious about notions of family, memory, and mortality. I grew up with my father: an avid hunter, archery champion, and former hunting guide, whose collection of taxidermy trophies began to grow exponentially that same year that I turned twelve. Before my father, my grandmother was a hunter and before that my great-grandmother, and long before that the stars made up constellations that told stories of the greatest hunts. In my work, the nuances of hunting culture and the rugged northern landscape are woven with narratives of genealogy and gender, memory and mythology, time and space.