How often do you make something that surprises you?

As the great photographer Jerry Uelsmann once said, and I paraphrase – if he has any goal, it is to surprise himself.

I think that is one of the most profound statements an artist can adopt. It is so difficult to surprise ourselves. After all, we are ourselves. To do something so out of our usual comfort zone that even we are surprised by what we do or the outcome of what we do is my mission.

I found that recently I wasn’t very surprised by myself. And by recently, I mean the past handful of years. I took risks, but they were calculated. I took risks that weren’t really all that dangerous. So, were they risks at all if I have to categorize them as baby risks? Probably not.

When I started photography I would have done anything – misshapen bodies, weird contortions, grotesque imagery. I think that as my taste for imagery grew, so did my images. But, they became more normal.

I’m beginning to shed that.
I’m beginning to stand out.

I’m doing it in small steps. I’m working my way back to the macabre. But I’m going there, little by little, day by day.

(Well, not my spine. My elk spine.)

Essentially, it comes down to this. I want to be willing to look into a strangers eyes and not break eye contact. I want to be able to stand proudly with my art, as dark as it may be or become, and be willing to stand by it. I want to represent my art by not backing down, but presenting my vision and not caring if it is weird or makes me an outsider.

I’m working on it.

How often do you create something that surprises you?

It started in a grocery store.

For months I had been dreaming of this image. In my mind I saw a woman in it with long silvery hair. I looked into buying wigs but was holding out to find just the right person. I looked on local modeling and agency websites but just couldn’t find the perfect fit. Until…

I was grocery shopping in my small town store, perusing the veggies as I am fond of doing, when I looked up and saw a woman with the most perfect long, gray hair. I looked at my husband and without saying any of what I was thinking, he said, “YES”. I am such a shy person that I battled with myself for a moment before going over. I rehearsed what I would say and my face kept turning red, but eventually, with some gentle nudging, I walked over to my mystery silver-haired lady.

I introduced myself awkwardly as she looked a little bit confused. She was hesitant to take part in the series for good reason. Here I was – looking particularly hippie-ish that day – approaching a stranger in a grocery store to model for a fine art series I was creating. I didn’t even have any examples to show yet of what it would be. Heck, I wasn’t even sure if it would work out. But I took the leap, and gave her my information, and left without a yes or no. She said she would look at my website and get back to me.

A little while later a glowing email appeared in my inbox. She had written me. My mystery grocery store woman! And she said yes. She said she felt a connection to what I was doing and was happy to model for me. I told her we’d make it a special shoot on my birthday and I prepared to make sure everything was absolutely ready for her arrival.

Preparing for this image turned out to be a hilarious task. Step one was to find a bed, which I found fairly quickly online for a good price. The problem? It was too tall. So, myself, my husband, and my friend got to work sawing the legs off the bed so that it would sit lower to the ground.

Next, I had to find a mattress. I am two things: stubborn and frugal. So, not wanting to spend money and desiring an already yucky mattress, I opted for a mattress that had been thrown out behind a mattress store. It was filthy, disgusting, stinky, moldy…everything awful. And yes, I am entirely aware of how incredibly stupid it is to pick a mattress off the street. Nonetheless, I did it. And aside from spreading mold to the floors and walls and potentially contracting some unknown rash, I was fine. Feel free to strike that last sentence from your memory. I know my friend has, who was so opposed to this idea I thought she would throw herself from my moving car. She came around, though. Here is said friend actually laying on the mattress for a test shot. Oh, the things we do for friendship!

Once the bed and mattress were obtained it was time to get sand. I insisted that we drive to some sand dunes about 5 hours from my house. I wanted authentic sand. I wanted the real deal. I wanted to be able to say: I GATHERED THAT SAND WITH MY OWN TWO HANDS IN THE HOT DESERT SUN! So that is what I did, sort of.

When I got to the sand dunes temperatures were reaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit. I get very sick in hot temperatures so I was already fading the moment we arrived. I couldn’t pull my car close to the dunes so we had to resort to walking up the dunes with trash bags and dragging them back to the car. This proved to be a physically taxing process, as the bags were very heavy and the sun was very hot. We were burning fast.

After about eight trash bags full of sand I decided I had reached my limit, and I left feeling slightly defeated. The day, however, was memorable and amazingly fun. I will never forget the onlookers thinking we were bonkers for trying to drag sand back to my car.

The rest of the sand I got from my favorite store (NOT) – Home Depot. All together it totaled 800lbs of sand. I reserved my beautiful sand dune sand for the top layer so that it would look yellow and smooth compared to the manufactured stuff. It was important to me that the sand be authentic because that sand came from hundreds upon thousands of years of breakdown and decay. I loved the idea that it would be even more held in history through a photograph.

It also served to further the idea of the image – time passing yet feeling trapped in it as well. It moves so quickly, and yet we are held in place by the fear of missing something. The spine – a whole other story in itself – was placed to show the decay that happens to us all, and to everything. The rotting bed was being taken over by death. The long, silvery hair that I so longed for helped to tell the story of a person who has been so stagnant that even her hair is growing into the scene.

I got asked many times at the Fourth Wall show opening if I manipulated the model’s hair to have a blue cast. I did not. Because of the color balance of the sand, anything neutral, including the walls and mattress, naturally had a blue hue to them even though they were all gray. I loved the effect and kept it in the final image.

When the day to shoot came, it was a beautiful one. The sun was shining, it was warm out, and my beautiful grocery store model even brought me hand crafted jewelry for my birthday. Since the setup was finished when she arrived we got to work shooting, which was faster than the first image in the series, and before I knew it I had my birthday wish – an image that I loved. I found it so fitting that I should shoot this image about time passing on my 29th birthday.

I hope you enjoy this new series which is on display and represented by the JoAnne Artman Gallery until February 18th. It is showing in New York City (Chelsea).

Very limited editions. Each print is offered at 42×42 inches with an edition of 2, and 8×8 inches with an edition of 3.

You may contact the gallery for purchase requests. Each print has been proofed, signed, and numbered by me, and comes with a certificate of authenticity.

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Photographed with a Sony a7ii and a 25mm Zeiss lens.

Model: SLC

Assistance: Kelly McGrady

When I dream, I dream of death. But when I’m living my normal, everyday life, it is filled with so much joy. Sometimes I think that I crave darkness because I have so little of it in my life. Maybe my dreams are filled with darkness to balance everything out. From running away from monsters to murderers breaking in to natural disasters and far more gruesome events, my dreams are absolutely riddled with death. But the most interesting thing about it, to me, is that beyond the darkness there is hope. It is sometimes so small and so hard to see, but I always wake up with a sense of beauty and hope.

That is what I would love for my photographs to evoke: darkness and beauty combined.

I was driving one day through a dirt road in a forest with my husband and aunt. She said she thought she saw animal bones, so on our way back through we stopped to look. Sure enough, there was an elk spine on the ground. We took it with us in our car and, after we got a ways on the road home, we realized that it was absolutely covered in maggots…and so was our car. So we rode home the rest of the way, immediately throwing the spine in our front yard when we arrived, and (as anyone would do) started vacuuming the maggots up out of the car. I yelled at everyone not to kill them and to be gentle, and we let them out when we emptied the vacuum. It was a very gross mess of a situation, but we were all laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe.

A neighbor had knocked on our door to ask if we were aware we had a spine in our yard. I tried to explain why I put it there, but she simply backed away slowly and I haven’t heard from her since. Fast forward to one year later. The spine was still sitting in my yard. Dogs passing by had moved it around several times but it never went too far. I decided it was finally time to utilize it. I had been hesitant because I honor death so much. I did not want to do anything that wouldn’t live up to the life it had once been a part of. But suddenly one day I decided I had to do something, and so I did.

We are all made of bones, fragile and strong all at once. We are all made of dust.

Where does your creativity come from?