SANCTUARY

These images are grounded in place. Coastal Marin County in Northern California has been a source of comfort and inspiration for me for over thirty years. By bottling images of this area and then re-photographing them against a field of blackness, I isolate and transform them into touchstones of an inner territory that is simultaneously wild and peaceful.

The word “sanctuary” connotes both a personal space of refuge and a protected wilderness area. These precious places, whether internal or external, each benefit from a certain containment in order to thrive.

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Please scroll down to the bottom to learn about the technical process.

I began this series by photographing the natural world within five miles of my home in Coastal California. The resulting prints were then bottled in mineral oil, creating sculptures for the Bottle Dreams series. To create the series Sanctuary, I photographed these sculptures against black velvet. The final archival pigment prints were made under my direction at Electric Works in San Francisco, using an Epson 9800 printer with an Ultrachrome K3 Inkset on Moab Entrada Natural White acid-free 100% cotton paper (300 gms) with no optical brighteners. Most prints in this series measure 16.5 x 11 inches on a 19.5 x 13.5 inch sheet.