Artist Statement:

 

While I Am Away

I have left behind aluminum lungs, pinhole eyes,

In the places I long to be,

Keeping watch.

They take in great gulps of sea air or

Great gulps of desert air,

Inhaling fog and rain and burning sand,

While time, pandemics, ice, floods and fires

Fill them, bake them and keep me away,

For sometimes painful years at a time.

Coons and coyotes and tiny spiders bear witness,

Human eyes pry.

Only the entrails of the weather,

And the traces of the sun, are fossilized into my absence,

And my hope to return.

 

The image here began in a homemade aluminum can pinhole camera that was left in the landscape of Arizona to capture the trails of the sun and my absence for a year. This is one of a continuing series of images taken at The Land With No Name Artist Residency in southern Arizona.