I often tell people that growing up in a family full of artists I felt like the only space left for me was the table. In our New York City apartment my dad used one bedroom for his studio, my mother had a drawing table at the end of the living room for her work, my older brothers were making model airplanes and super eight films in their bedroom and my younger brother and I were sharing the other room. The rest of the apartment was filled with surf boards, bicycles, sculptures and prints. My parents slept in what might have been called the maid’s room in another era.
The theater of our home happened mostly at the dining room table. My father often read aloud family round-robin letters from his father and relatives. My brothers spun shaggy dog stories or concocted outrageous puns. I sat pondering the milk pitcher and mentally redesigned my misshapen first attempts at a sugar bowl.
During 2020 I have completely embraced our home in Virginia. I am happy to make small circles around our property as well as back and forth to and from the studio. But there are those moments when I miss the big cities of Washington, DC or New York where museums, galleries, restaurants and stages hold the promise of imaginative answers to our current situation. As I photograph for this series I have been struck by how I create a little theater of backdrops, objects and pots to express how hope is the opposite of desperation and how it is not as comfortable as certainty.
“Hope is the opposite of desperation—it’s not as comfortable as certainty, and it’s much more certain than longing. It is always accompanied by the imagination, the will to see what our physical environment seems to deem impossible. Only the creative mind can make use of hope. Only a creative people can wield it.”
— Jericho Brown, excerpt from One Whole Voice which in turn is comprised of extracts from “A God in the House: Poets Talk about Faith,” edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler, Tupelo Press, 2012. [In Poetry Magazine on Poetry Foundation website]