Travelers through the Irish landscape frequently encounter visual reminders of the past. Unlike in the U.S., built structures in Ireland are often left alone or added to, rather than replaced. It helps that many are made of stone. For the last five thousand years, stone structures -- dolmens, ring forts, castles, abbeys, churches, cemeteries -- persist as accumulated visual layers of the island’s long history. Some dry-stone walls dividing fields are contemporary; others that look similar are ancient. A graveyard might have occupants buried next to each other but interred hundred years apart.
The typical act of photographing freezes a single moment in time through the click of the camera’s shutter. For these pieces, however, I use multiple exposure photography to disturb and compress layers of the landscape’s history. While in the field, I recorded as many as nine views of the same subject, which my camera cumulatively combined into a single image. The apparent solidity of the landscape becomes attenuated. The resulting semi-abstract compositions can be mildly disorienting. Viewers are thus invited to relax preconceptions they may have about photography providing clarity.
