Driving through a small town in Tennessee, I met two sisters who invited me on an adventure into their world. The landscapes they roamed were spaces for them to bond, rebel, and rest without observation. This reminded me of my girlhood and the time I spent wandering through the landscape with my girl cousins. Fairy tales, urban legends, and our parents alike told us nature brings harm or harsh lessons to girls. While warned not to stray, desire rose above fear, and we disappeared into the depths where we felt closest to ourselves. From Genesis’ creation story to inherited fairytales, the stigmatization of witches and healers, to true crime media, these stories have cast a shadow of fear over women, distancing the natural and the feminine throughout history.
Nostalgia is present throughout this body of work, a relentless attempt to revisit the past while fully aware of its inaccessibility. It is not only a longing for childhood as a period of time, but for the mindset that once shaped how I moved through the world, when I felt freer in the landscape before the stories passed down began to seep in. Through these photographs, I have woven the girls’ journey with my own memories. In doing so, I have come to understand that my deepest fear was never 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.
