Beside the Lake, 2023
As We Rest in the Shadows
While passing through a small town in Tennessee, I met two sisters who invited me on an adventure into their world. The landscapes they roamed became spaces for them to bond, rebel, tell secrets and rest without observation. This reminded me of my own girlhood and the summers I spent wandering through lakes, woods, brush, and valleys with the girls who walked alongside me.
Fairy tales, urban legends, and our parents alike warned us that nature was not a place for girls, only a place where harm or a harsh lesson awaited. Across narratives, the pattern repeats: a girl steps into the landscape and something goes wrong. She is tempted, punished, devoured, or blamed. In Genesis, Eve’s curiosity becomes the origin of fault. Women associated with healing and the natural world were recast as witches and treated as threats. In modern true crime, the story continues: a woman is alone in nature, and harm is assumed to be waiting for her in the shadows. These stories accumulate, and their weight has distanced the feminine from the natural world. As children, these stories existed but they did not yet live inside us. Though we were warned not to stray from the path, our curiosity rose above our fear. In the lush woods and dark waters, we felt free, disappearing into the landscape and closer to ourselves. It is only with age that the stories began to settle deeper into internalized caution. The same woods that once held possibility now carry an awareness of vulnerability.
Nostalgia is present in this body of work, a relentless attempt to revisit the past while fully aware of its inaccessibility, not only for childhood as a period of time, but for the mindset that once shaped how I moved through the world. Through these photographs, I have woven the girls’ journey with my own memories, and in doing so, I have come to understand that my deepest fear was not rooted in the cautionary tales themselves, but in the realization that this time had an expiration, that one day we would have to leave behind both the place and the way we existed within it.