Cicada

We all come from somewhere.

Our ancestors set the stage for us and cleared the way to the lives we live today. 

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This project began when I looked through the very old family photo albums that were left behind after my parents died in 2016 and 2017. They had been stuffed away in the back of a cupboard, 

and I had never seen them before, so I hung on to them. I put them away in the back of a cupboard at my house. It was four years before I went through them thoroughly and appreciated them for what they were; a material link between myself and those who came before. Some were also just really beautiful images.

 

On both sides of my family, the generations before, my parents were rural folks, making their living and raising their families on farms in Southern Ontario, Canada. It is this knowledge that drew me to the countryside just beyond the city limits where I live today to make new images and to attempt to make visceral contact with the past through photography. This project explores the visual and emotional connections that bind my family and the rural landscape by combining newly made images with family photos from the 1920s through the 1960s.