Snag

Three years ago, I was leaving for the airport after saying goodbye to my mother. She was dying of cancer. On the long drive across the Alberta prairie, I found myself distracted by flapping remnants of plastic bags, caught in barbed-wire fences that lined the ditches. Whipped violently by the wind, they were left shredded and lacerated but trapped nonetheless in the no man's land of boundary fences, neither here nor there. Thinking about mortality, pain and death in the context of my mother's terminal illness, these forgotten shreds of plastic took on a deeper significance. Snag. Shooting during the seemingly lifeless seasons between winter and spring in 2015 and 2016, I photographed fifty-seven sites in Southern Alberta, Canada. Some locations required multiple visits to ensure the optimal lighting and wind conditions. All the photographs were shot using analogue film in a medium format camera. Given the focus of the subject matter on physical, material processes of decomposition by natural forces, it was critical to the logic of this series to maintain the immediacy of their chemical, indexical imprint on the film. Its translation onto a slightly warm-toned fibre-based photo paper creates a material, substantial presence that would have been impossible to achieve digitally.