Ritual & Relic is a body of work which was created after a long break of art-making in 2010. I purposefully decided to veer far of course from my usual photographic content of portraits, and create works of the natural environment around my then-home situated on nearly 200 acres of land in western NC. This was a personal exercise and examination of how art-making is a ritualistic process for myself, and how ultimately, and sometimes sentimentally, each piece created inevitably becomes relic-- a simple object, with or without importance, but fundamentally describing something about a time or a person. Utilizing the wet place collodion process allowed me to further explore the idea of ritual and object, with the result being an ambrotype -- a relic of photographic history on a piece of glass.
All images here are 4.25" x 5.25" wet plate collodion ambrotypes.