This body of work emerged from a deep, lived entanglement with the land and spirits of Collepino, a small village in Umbria, Italy. I stayed there for three months, walking the Roman Aqueduct Trail, tracing olive groves, and listening to the voices carried by Mt. Subasio’s winds. I gathered pigments from the ground—ash from spring burn piles, charcoal from wildfires, sediment from ancient streets—and wove them into paint.
Each painting is an act of devotion, a record of love for place. The earth itself offered its materials and stories. These are not representations, but collaborations—visual murmurs of presence, memory, and transformation.
The series now belongs to Earth Remains, a larger cosmology of works shaped by ecological grief, spiritual witnessing, and the agency of matter. Collepino changed me. These paintings hold that change.
Elm
Alongside the paintings, these black-and-white photographs were made while walking the Roman Aqueduct Trail between Collepino and Spello in the radiant spring of 2023. Captured with a Holga 120N, they gather light and time through the dream logic of double exposure, light leaks, and the unruly chemistry of caffenol and sea salt. The images feel unearthed rather than made—grainy, ghosted, tender.
They carry the same breath as the pigment paintings: a love letter to place, to walking, to the whispering presence of trees. Each image is a trace of an ancient path, where water once moved, and where time now drifts.
Elm was exhibited in Women in Photography at the Glasgow Gallery of Photography, March 2024.
