My photographs were created to bring awareness to the alarming decrease of birds and insects, particularly pollinators, and to be a catalyst for change. Inspired by Victorian Memento Mori, photos that exquisitely pose a deceased family member in their finest clothes and surrounded by their favorite objects. I too pose my subjects in an imagined environment. With each photo I explore the juxtaposition between permanence and impermanence and the clash between beauty and the precarious state of our world. I created my Environmental Memento Mori images to honor my subjects whose troubling decline makes their recognition important and poignant.
The images are produced by layering my subject, botanical materials, and dyes on multiple sheets of glass separated by blocks. The assemblage is photographed as one image through the glass layers simultaneously creating a fantasy environment that once captured allows the subject to live on forever.
