Water is sometimes sharp and sometimes strong, sometimes acid and sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet and sometimes thick or thin, sometimes it is seen bringing hurt or pestilence, sometime health-giving, sometimes poisonous. It suffers change into as many natures as are the different places through which it passes. And as the mirror changes with the colour of its subject, so it alters with the nature of the place, becoming noisome, laxative, astringent, sulfurous, salty, incarnadined, mournful, raging, angry, red, yellow, green, black, blue, greasy, fat or slim. Sometimes it starts a conflagration, sometimes it extinguishes one; is warm and is cold, carries away or sets down, hollows out or builds up, tears or establishes, fills or empties, raises itself or burrows down, speeds or is still; is the cause at times of life or death, or increase or privation, nourishes at times and at others does the contrary; at times has a tang, at times is without savor, sometimes submerging the valleys with great floods. In time and with water, everything changes.
~ from H2O – The Mystery, Art, and Science of Water (http://witcombe.sbc.edu/water/artleonardo.html)
Water is the most abundant compound on earth and can be seen as a liquid, a solid or a gas. Throughout time, humans have had an intense attraction to and relationship with water. Water is an important component of our physical existence but it also represents much more than simple sustenance. Water lives in psychological, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual aspects of our lives as well. As I have explored my own relationship with water in visual terms, I also have realized how deeply connected my life is to water. When I was young, my family spent summers at the ocean and I used to play in the creek that flowed through our property. My zodiac sign is cancer, a water sign. I vividly remember the physics lab exercises that dealt with wavelengths by creating ripples in water. Water can be incredibly soothing and comforting but it can also be terribly destructive. While all of these factors are important it is the dynamics of water to which I am really becoming attracted. I began to see a direct correlation between the water I was using as a subject and the technology I was using to capture it. With a camera, you can record a duration of time in a single frame or stop the action with a fast shutter speed. As the camera exaggerates any sense of time and action, water can also vary its visual presence based on its flow or stagnation. It is the diversity of this dynamic in which I am most interested.
In the course of pursuing the landscape as a photographic subject, I became more and more entranced by water and what it was capable of doing visually. After a while, the landscape disappeared and only the water was left. The images you see presented here were created during a three-month residency at the Prairie Center of the Arts in Peoria, Illinois. My goal for this residency was to take what I knew about water, light, and photography into the studio in order to create a controlled environment where I could manipulate all three of the elements in the creation of abstract images. To me, these photographs are more like paintings and drawings and speak to an emotional landscape where water is not only the subject but also the tool for creating images.