This is an ongoing series that began in 2021, with a trip to visit my mother’s birth family in Mississippi and Louisiana. I was interested in exploring the strong military ties and deep-rooted Southern heritage I knew was essential to understanding and building relationships with this side of my family.

Several days were spent exploring Civil War battlefields with my aunt, uncle and cousins — hunting for ghosts of fallen soldiers in the tall Mississippi grass, listening to family stories, drinking beer and talking politics. I documented everything with my camera and came home inspired by the histories and family I had connected with, and truly enchanted by the haunting and beautiful battlefields I had visited. These landscapes called to me and Quiltscapes emerged as a result:

“Quiltscapes: the work of making meaning” pulls content from landscape photos I took when visiting the South. I render these landscapes by hand, in pencil, but in the shape of various Civil War-era quilting squares - each a unique design with its own meaning. I love that positive/negative space can hold opposites, and while the juxtaposition of battlefields (a traditionally masculine terrain) and quilting squares (the domestic domain of women) are one example of this, this body of work continues to reveal these and many more dualities as it continues to develop.