The recent past refuses to fade. Loss visited me again and again, each time settling into memory the way light exposes film. Still frames, lingering. 

It has rearranged my inner landscape, changing how I move through the outer world. Nature never felt neutral, but now even less so. It triggers my senses, pulling me back and forth between the visible and the unseen. 

I took this photograph the other day. A tree, ancient and weathered, its trunk splitting and rejoining, singular and multiple at once, branches reaching outward like arms. 

Right there, the tree wasn’t really a tree. It was a memory wearing the shape of one. 

A presence. 

A person. 

See, roots and branches have always felt complementary to me. What extends upward answers what burrows below. The tree seemed to hold both – grounded and reaching, anchored and searching. It felt human in that way. 

I let it all in. Its oddly familiar form. The sound of leaves rustling in the wind, echoing voices I almost recognized. Were they saying anything at all, or was I filling the silence myself? Did it matter which one was true?

We like to think of memories as something we can access deliberately, but they often arrive uninvited. A sound, a smell, a sight opens a door to another time and place. And yet, we can only stand at the threshold. We can never truly return. Maybe that's why photographs have always carried a muted sadness to me. In preserving the past, they also confirm absence. 

—

This way of seeing has been guiding my latest body of work. I’ve called it “Yesterday’s Todays” – the idea that what we carry forward is always layered. The present, entangled in the past. The past continuing to surface, reshaping itself in the now. 

In the studio, this circularity unfolds as shapeshifting. One day the work feels planned, controlled, domesticated. The next, it becomes intuitive, wandering, almost playful in its uncertainty. I oscillate between structure and instinct. 

Even the palette responds to this tension. 

Black and white feels honest. Pure. Unfiltered. There’s a directness to it – a sense of seeing without interference. Color would add meaning too quickly, too loudly, dressing the work in emotion before it has time to breathe. It’s a mask, a distraction from the truth. And I don’t feel the need to hide anything.