Vivienne Morgan

Between Two Lands

I’m English- no snow lover- and the weather here fills me with nostalgia for England.  I’ve lived in the US for twenty six years and I’ve never taken American citizenship, but sooner than later I must make a choice.  I’ve been thinking about place and identity, why it’s hard to go back, and this meditation on acceptance has led me to look locally for places which remind me of England and Europe, to find solace or perhaps as a point of compromise. 

The “Solstice” “Greenwood” and “Absence series began as digital and Holga photographs shot locally.  In “Greenwood” the clipped formality and placement of the topiary allude to the hedges of a formal English garden, or a walk in Hyde Park.  In “Solstice” the fog and early morning light turns the trees into monolithic stones measuring the length of the day like Stonehenge at Solstice.  In the Absence series, reflective quality of the prints on aluminum make the imagery fugitive and the place hard to grasp.  In Absence Found, the same place becomes a fractured, unidentifiable place compulsively repeated: the act of combing for evidence of something lost.