Archival pigment print
42 × 56 inches
Edition 1 of 3 +2AP
Bolinas Museum
Mt. Tam Artist Statement
May we all find a Bay Mountain that gives us a crystal moment of being and a breath of the sky, and only asks us to hold the whole world dear. – Gary Snyder
This is the first time I’ve made a body of work at home. A landscape photographer is accustomed to being out there. With Mt. Tamalpais, out there is right here. Our beautiful Bay Mountain is always in view, rising from the Pacific and falling into the bay, but up close it is many different things. You can feel tiny amidst the dense and looming redwoods. You can gain perspective above the clouds.
To make this work, I look for pockets of time to be alone on the mountain, mid-week and off-season, when I can sit and be present to the elements. Like any photographer, I watch the light as it plays across the land, backlighting the edge of a moss-covered tree or illuminating a distant yellow field. For me, representational imagery of any single view fails to convey the full-bodied experience of nature. Heightening the experience through color comes closer to the truth. I discover my photographs by distorting, filtering and reconstructing the natural world around me, in real time. During the process, everything looks wrong until, suddenly, it all feels exactly right.
Creating work on Mt. Tam might be the closest thing to a studio practice I have ever known. Remote wilderness is poised, in its otherworldliness, to offer perspective. Here at the edge of the Bay, dropping into the state of mind where I make my work is a bit closer, more accessible. Just like that, I can leave the unanswered messages and half-finished chores and disappear into nature. But proximity is its own challenge. The distractions of city life are magnetic.
And then there’s the fog! The weather on Mt. Tam amplifies its mystery. Countless times, I have filled my bag with a day’s worth of heavy glass and set out before dawn, only to find a fog that will not lift or burn away. What’s the worst thing that happens? I take a lovely walk: a practice in itself. My head clears. My imagination wanders into meditative emptiness. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to forget that I am separate from what’s around me. That shift – from belonging to oneness – is the subject of these images.
There's one spot on the Bolinas Ridge to which I always return: my Sit Place. Elsa Gidlow could be describing it: “It is like a journey to space to walk there, to begin in dense fog and climb above it to see what was dark and grey below spread out brilliantly white in the sunshine.” Returning time and again to that same cliff, I think of what Etel Adnan, for whom Mt. Tam long served as a muse, wrote of time spent on the mountain: "I am left with the sort of wonder that the sense of eternity always carries with it.” Which is maybe only to say, it feels like home.
Archival pigment print
42 × 56 inches
Edition 1 of 3 +2AP
Bolinas Museum
Archival pigment print
64 × 48 inches
Edition 1 of 3 +2AP
Bolinas Museum
Archival pigment print
40 × 30 inches
Edition 1 of 3 +2AP
Bolinas Museum
Archival pigment print
40 × 30 inches
Edition 1 of 3 +2AP
Bolinas Museum
Archival pigment print
40 × 30 inches
Edition 1 of 3 +2AP
Bolinas Museum
Archival pigment print
40 × 30 inches - Edition of 3 +2AP
TBD - Edition of 3 + 2AP
Bolinas Museum
Archival pigment print
40 × 30 inches - Edition of 3 +2AP
TBD - Edition of 3 + 2AP
Bolinas Museum
Archival pigment print
30 × 40 inches - Edition of 3 +2AP
TBD - Edition of 3 + 2AP
Bolinas Museum
Archival pigment print
40 × 30 inches - Edition of 3 +2AP
TBD - Edition of 3 + 2AP
Bolinas Museum