I began photographing Upheaval while searching for a home within my body and the world around me following a series of life rupturing events that permanently altered my inner landscape. My body becomes a place and the land becomes a body through the act of photography as I search for a home within a web of complicated relationships. Set in transition between a hometown and a chosen home, both within Appalachia, Upheaval revisits childhood memories and forges new connections between body and geography to assemble a sense of self informed by cycles of grief and upheaved circumstances.
This work uses repetition to disrupt a linear narrative of healing. Rather than depicting a journey towards a healed state after trauma and acute illness, Upheaval meditates on the ways that grief lives within my body by returning to repeated visual motifs and gestures in documentary and self portrait photography. Lumen prints of medical ephemera introduce chronic illness into the work as a backdrop that informs images that may not otherwise be read in a medical context. Rather than arriving at a fictional “healed” state, Upheaval points to a continuous process of transition in the relationship between my body and the world around me.
