Sensing Currents

There is something mysterious about the ways sunlight affects the senses of humans and plants, how leaves and branches instinctively turn sunward or how humans react to the growing or diminishing light of a day's beginning or end. It is fascinating to imagine what plants and trees might experience as their sense organs react to these stimuli too. What does a plant sense with the first rays of light in the morning or the last at night? What does touch feel like to a plant? Do they even sense touch? What does rain, wind or even thunder feel like? And how do these organisms communicate with one another? Contemplating the answers to these questions guided the image making for this series. Using Fujifilm Fujichrome Provia 100 transparencies and playing with the expressive focusing capabilities of an analog 4x5 view camera, I showed the landscape in abstract, vivid and foreign ways, intended to suggest the unknown and mysterious aspects of this idea of plant consciousness. And, the visual interpretation is shown as abstract planes of focus directing viewers to the in-focus areas in each image. The project was photographed during mornings and late afternoons in Governor's Park, Tallahassee, Florida 2016.