In Their Words
Animals communicate, just in a different way than humans. This body of work is my way of capturing that. The work grew out of my photography of farm animals I volunteer with. I’ve always intended my images to reveal how animals feel, their energy more than how they look.
I wanted to tell their stories, to find a way into their experience, which led to using words about them with their portrait. This quickly turned into asking them what they wanted to say with their portrait. Not what I wanted to say, but what they did. That’s how this work grew.
Rasta, Poet of Gentle
Rasta was rescued with his best friend Daisy Mae who is a goat, which doesn’t matter to Rasta. Love is love. Rasta is pure gentleness. He’s wary of humans, but at peace with his friends, with the earth, with the plants he searches out to graze on. A word-free poet of peace, moving in the energy of it, alchemizing the green and life of plants into love moving through him and into the atmosphere, the flow of story and meaning like a river holding all of us.
Goddess of Demands
Dolly is a consummate diva. It’s not a skill, it’s an essence. It’s who she is. And she knows who she is and what her value and importance is in the grand scheme of things. And she is a grand figure demanding her due. From you, if you are in front of her. If you have that honor. Do you know your worth? Not as a me over you, hierarchical thing. As a who you are, child of the Earth, child of the Universe, child of the Almighty. Dolly knows who she is. And what she wants. And she makes that demand as a moral imperative.
Reynoso, of Myth and Legend
Reynoso is clearly the descendant of Shadowfax and every mystical horse hero of Arabian Nights. He is luminous magic. Moonlight come down to walk the earth. Nobility, spirit, myth. He awakens in human the echoes of stories of old, of ancient hero’s journeys through a world with every single thing alive and communicating: trees, mountains, plants, rocks.
Sacred Saint of Soft
The blessed softness of Wilbur, the most gentle pig with his aura of peace. Sit with him and you can let yourself melt into the soft of his presence, his aura. His body is bent with arthritis but his spirit is a river of peace flowing out into the world.
Wilbur, Pig of Wisdom
The Wise, King of the Half-Smile, the inner knowing. Walk with Wilbur into a summer pasture and feel the knowing he has for the plants, the sun, the earth under your feet.
He will come up to you to scratch his back and let him calm you with the warm of his skin and the flow of his breath. He knows earth and mud in ways that don’t need words, that can’t be expressed with words.
Goddess of Power in Small
Gracie is tiny but strong. She know the skills that come from being the smallest goat in her group. She slips between fences into untouched pastures, she finds a way into what she wants. You can follow her secret passageways to gated worlds. The Goddess of the expansive world accessed through the smallest doorway.
King of Sweetness
Wilbur, both soft and sweet, the King of All that is Gentle and Good. His body is limited with arthritis which somehow makes his spirit that much softer and freer to let go into being held by the earth.
Biscuit the Magician.
Biscuit doesn’t arrive, he appears. How he gets himself next to you, you might not see. Such is the mystery of the magician. So you give him a back scratch because he is Biscuit and you know or intuit your role as provider of scratches and receiver of the blessing of being in the presence of Biscuit—a gift of grace you may deserve or not, but you accept with gratitude.
The Smiling Saint
Oreo is almost always smiling. He doesn’t always welcome humans and sometimes needs quiet time not human time. And here, the humans get that need and let Oreo say hello and then wander off into the woods to commune with the plants and trees as he grazes. In the deep peace that seems to surround saints and magic trees.
Queen of Loud
Loudness is just sweetness at a very high decibel level. Loud is just HI and HELLO in a big earsplitting way. That is Big Baby. Big, expressive and impossible to ignore. Though why ignore love coming at you and possibly challenging your eardrums? Big Baby is deaf and doesn’t know the jet-engine levels of her communication, but she knows love and humans coming to her with open hearts. She can feel what she can’t hear. And love isn’t about words anyway, it’s always about action.
Poet of the Pasture
Carson has always been the most sensitive soul and he’s also blind. He feels your footsteps on the ground as you walk toward him. He senses people coming through the gate. He is the poet of the pasture, recording poetry in his heart about the plants and bees and dragonflies, about his best friend Elvis, and the warmth of the sun, the movement of the breeze. And the slow pulse of the earth under him. Poetry and odes and lyrics in harmony with the music of the universe.
Rasta, the most gentle spirit in the universe. Shy around humans, but in communion with the spirits of the plants and the bugs and the air itself. He absorbs peace from the plants and sends it back out into the world making it a softer place for the rest of us.
Goddess of Discovery
Leslie is the explorer of the farm. She investigates plants and tastes, where everything is located, how things change. And then she chews her cud and maps it all in her mind. Exporing and making maps of the places she has gone and what she has found. A map, after all, is a kind of story, a layered understanding of place.
Discovery and cartography are Leslie’s calling, as they were for all the great explorers of the globe throughout history.
The Prophet of the Bold
The is Hannah: celebrating the breaking through of doors, gates and limitations. Saying to the universe on the other side of any barrier as you burst through, Hello! I am here! Let the joy, discovery and magic begin!
Shyness has no place. Withholding, hiding, self-denial have no place in the World of Hannah. The unknown is a pool to be cannon-balled into. There is no joy too small to be relished. And she asks, what are you waiting for?