Photo:  Pam White; Sculpture:  Gillian Jagger

This photo is from a shoot that I did recently with Pam White at Gillian Jagger’s studio.  Since I first saw her work in New York in 2002, I have wanted to enter it, dance with it, let it speak into my body and my movement.  We began with her hoofprints, and Pam and I will go back to do more in a couple weeks.  I have no clear idea about where this work is going.  I don’t think that is important, at least for now.

I have gotten better at just following the cues, at seeing the flickers at the edge of my mind, at dropping in to an obsession and letting it open me up.  For a few years after adopting my daughters, I lost that connection.  I was all mother, all the time.  It felt like the well of images and inspiration had evaporated.  They hadn’t, but I had  bigger and more compelling obsessions at the time.

The trauma of losing my youngest daughter has pushed me into some very scary places.  Empty places.  Frightened spaces.  Dark, anxious, endless.  But stuff grows in the dark, in the cold.  Maybe what takes hold in that soil is fiercer, more resiient, more insistent.  That, anyway, is how it feels.  New ground, every day.