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Wherever the Sky Follows You (2024 – )

Wherever the Sky Follows You investigates the tenuous relationship between place and placelessness, as well as the way place relates to memory, home, and healing. The sky and the color blue are significant motifs within this body of work. The sky, as perhaps the only universal feature of the landscape, represents a symbolic bridge between place and placelessness. Photographs of the sky are indicative of a physical location; however, in its generality, the sky on its own fails to be a landmark of any specific place. Additionally, while our blue sky is so intrinsically tied to life on earth, it is synonymous with the heavens in many cultures. It thus represents a place and every place, life and death, the natural and the supernatural. 


The series is primarily photo-based. It has been composed almost entirely from images taken while in transit. Utility poles, highway signs, and trees thus become other recurring features of the work. Inspired by Marc Aug’s concept of non-place, I think of the commute as an existence in liminal space. Much of my time has been spent on the road, in a non-space. As an adult, I live in a rural community, which means I spend a significant amount of time between locations. As a toddler, I rode with my parents across the country from Arizona to Georgia as we relocated. As a child, my closest set of grandparents was 370 miles from our home, so it was a long drive to visit extended family. As an adolescent, my family moved between states twice more, and I would add two more out-of-state moves after my own child was born. I feel a significant connection to this liminality, being in constant movement from one place to another.

The title of this series –– “wherever the sky follows you” –– refers to the idea of being wherever the sky also exists: a home as a place built where a person is rather than where they’ve come from, lingering in a moment of time rather than a spatial location, loving a friend or family member wherever they go in the world. 
It also refers to the difference between a loss as a result of relocation and a loss as a result of death. I experienced the passing of a close friend when I was seventeen years old. I had already moved several states away and had not seen physically seen him in nearly two years, but as long as he was located where the sky also was, I could still speak to him. I could still travel to visit someday. In dying, in spite of its heavenly connotations, he went where the sky does not follow.  















In 2024, I had the opportunity to revisit the northwest Georgia area where I grew up. The branches and pinecone in What the Trees Have Seen were gathered during this time. The branches were taken from below the trees where a close friend died in 2014, and the pinecone was sourced from my childhood home.  
The myriad blues in the work come from images of the sky and connect to the sky motif. Blue is symbolic of serenity and spirituality, but it also communicates a degree of otherworldliness. Aside from the sky, so little of the natural world is blue. The rich blues and ethereality of the manipulated landscapes thus act to reinforce the themes of liminality and placelessness.