I've spent the better part of the last two months just getting situated. Putting my stuff into places, and finding new stuff, and finding places that need stuff. So I haven't quite established a way of working in my new place, or where to find the things I need to make work, or how to connect to places to make new work. Hopefully this will change as I get out of town for a week or so, and reconnect to my normal process of making things (although it will be significantly altered.)

So I don't have a whole lot to contribute to new inspirations. But maybe I'm rather taking this time to think back a bit on what I've been working on before I enter a new phase of work and (worry?) about how that will come to end.

So here are some photos that are more towards the beginning of what I've been working on the last few years. They are photos of a trip I took to Mount St. Helens, which erupted in 1980. At the time I went to visit it (nearly 30 years later), the volcano began a new cycle of activity - rebuilding it's lava dome. Although I didn't experience it's original eruption, I lived a few hours away from it at the time I took these pictures, and in the shadow of Mount Rainer a much larger and potentially much more devastating volcano that was labeled dormant. Regardless, and as cool as volcanoes are, I was less concerned with the mountain itself, but rather the area around it.


This was really the beginning of my inquiry, and I have a lot of photos of this. After the volcano erupted it knocked over all of the trees for miles. Logging companies came and took those trees and also started logging the forests nearby. After clearcutting an area, they replanted acres of trees. Different areas of the forest were replanted in different years and have signs marking them. Because of all of this there are large plots of land with the exact same trees, all the exact same age, grown at the same height and sometimes in clear rows. It seems like an optical illusion when you stare at them. And it reminded me a lot of digital media and video. With these perfect interlacing horizontal and vertical lines that are natural, but human-enhanced.


This is some little cave at the base of Mount St. Helens. Since around it nearly everywhere is death, I wonder what lives in it.











This is the top of the spent mountain, with a new dome of rock slowly smoking and being created.












These are the surrounding hills at the base of the mountain. What used to be covered in forest, is now covered in thousands of quiet logs laying down. Bleached white from laying in the sun for thirty years, but maybe also the heat and shock of the initial blast.







In the forests along the perimeter of Mount St. Helens, logging companies are still hard at work clearcutting vast areas. These are the neat little piles they leave behind after clearing an area.