A few years ago, I moved from the East Coast of the United States to Colorado. As a newcomer to the west, I became fascinated by the ruins and rock art left behind by ancient native peoples. I began to travel the mountain and desert west to photograph these haunting places. As I began off trail hiking and scrambling in search of undocumented sites, I discovered the bones of many wild animals. I wondered if they were evidence of a healthy predator-prey relationship, or of climate change and environmental degradation.
These bones exerted a strange power over me. They called out to be seen, noticed, honored, made special in their moment of entropy. I began to photograph them on-site but was disappointed with the result. One particular find of three adjacent bones alerted me to the deeper poetic possibilities they offered. I began to take them to my studio where I could have complete control of composition and lighting. Afterward I return them to their place in the wilderness. From this beginning came the Nature Morte series.
References to art forms as varied as architecture, music and mythology are encoded in their arrangements. Time's passage - the weathering and decomposition of solid bone, the staining by organic matter, the bleaching by the sun - is illuminated in these surviving fragments of a life. The Nature Morte photographs capture an isolated instant in the cycle of life, mortality within the circle of time, structure and order found within chaos.
