“What interests the historian of everyday life is the invisible.”^1.

I strive to make that invisible visible in my images. I see nature through our everyday technologies. Rolled strings of electric lights become bird nests. In the afternoon, I watch as people move through the shadows of trees while adding the shadows of their cell phones to the landscape. These composite images capture the poetic juxtaposition of nature with digital technologies in daily life.

“Everyday life is what we are given every day, what presses us, even oppresses us, because there does not exist an oppression of the present. Every morning, on awakening, we feel the weight of life, the difficulty of living, or of living in a certain condition, with a particular weakness or desire. Everyday life is what holds us intimately, from the inside. It is history at the halfway point of ourselves, almost in recess, sometimes veiled.”^2.

My formal structure is the grid. These grids are as influenced by the data in an Excel spreadsheet as by the thread of fabrics and tapestries and the data contained in a quilt. The rhythm of the activities I capture is simulated using the grid to allow the narrative sequences to appear on paper. This structure enhances the simultaneous abstract and narrative aspects of the image. At a distance, the images appear to be a repeating pattern, a series of landscape elements or a tapestry, but as one gets closer a narrative emerges, and finally one sees the details of the story.

My works begin as pictures captured with a digital camera. They are about the intersection of our daily experience with digital technologies. Many of the images start as cell-phone images that are immediately sent to someone else who sends back comments or sends other related images. The process of making the final images is mediated by the technology itself. In the final production stage, the Adobe Photoshop Contact Sheet Command is used to build the composite image.