Rapt

This series of photographs focuses on trees that have been used as supports for a variety of chains, cables, or sections of fencing, used to restrict access to the landowner’s property. Over time, as these trees continued to grow with these constricting bands of material, the dialectical tension between man and nature builds to a particularly emotional pitch. As the wires, cables, and chains cut into the trunks of the trees (a process literally called ‘strangulation’), the organic vegetal response seems to embody deeply human, visceral feelings of pain, emotional constriction and dogged survival. Entitled “Rapt,” this series of fifty-four photographs made in 2013 and 2017 opens the landscape into a series of tightly focused moments of intense engagement between man and nature. The sites I photographed spoke to me strongest in the days of transition from winter to spring when the scene was enveloped in flat, grey light and there was no foliage on the trees to distract from them.