ALL OF THE THINGS
All of the Things is a new body of photographic work that uses portraiture to examine disability through objects. Rather than treating things as props or background, I photograph them as if they were sitters: attentive, necessary, worn, and marked by use. The work focuses on ordinary objects shaped by disability, dependence, and care, including assistive devices, household tools, garments, furniture, and other intimate belongings that structure daily life. Through photography, these items become stand-ins for the body and witnesses to forms of adaptation, repetition, vulnerability, and survival.
I am interested in the way disability reorganizes the material world. Objects that might otherwise appear neutral take on new meaning when they are relied upon repeatedly, repositioned for access, modified, or brought into close bodily relation. A cane leaning by a doorway, a chair pulled near a table, a folded cloth, a tray, a support cushion, a rail, a pair of shoes: these objects quietly record the negotiations between body and environment. They bear the evidence of use. In this project, I slow down the act of looking and ask what these objects can reveal about the lived textures of disability.
The work sits between still life and portraiture. I use the formal language of photographic portraiture such as framing, proximity, light, posture, scale, and repetition to grant dignity and presence to things that are often overlooked. In doing so, I am also exploring substitution: the way an object can speak beside the body, for the body, or in place of the body. The photographs do not aim to illustrate disability directly. Instead, they approach it through atmosphere, relation, and material evidence. They attend to maintenance, care, fragility, endurance, and the quiet systems of support that structure everyday life.
This project extends my ongoing interest in domestic space, material culture, and the emotional charge carried by ordinary objects. It also builds on my broader interdisciplinary practice, in which photography functions as both a documentary tool and a site of construction, staging, and conceptual inquiry. Here, photography allows me to create an archive of lived relation, one in which objects are understood not as inert possessions but as active participants in the making of daily life. They steady us, accompany us, constrain us, and help compose the shape of our days.
The proposed body of work will consist of a series of carefully staged photographic portraits produced in my home and studio. I will work slowly and iteratively, testing different arrangements, backdrops, scales, and lighting conditions in order to emphasize the specificity and presence of each object. Some images will isolate a single object, while others will assemble small constellations of related things. Together, the photographs will form a sustained meditation on disability as a material practice of adjustment, attention, and exchange between body and world.
In addition to the photographs I also completed a manuscript for a memoir entited "When I Close My Eyes I See Orange." It is my first memoir.
All the Things that Make this Home: A Kind of Un-raveling and Re-building of the Human Spirit
archival inkjet print
36 x 54 inches
2024
Ol' Miss Pink Eyes
archival inkjet print
36 x 54 inches
2026
Blue Nose
archival inkjet print
36 x 54 inches
2026
Polka says "Hi."
archival inkjet print
36 x 54 inches
2026
Norwegian Weaver
archival inkjet print
36 x 54 inches
2026
Lil' Pinky
archival inkjet print
x 54 inches
2026
Carl
archival inkjet print
36 x 54 inches
2026
Olympia
archival inkjet print
36 x 54 inches
2026
Clip Monster
archival inkjet print
36 x 54 inches
2026
Funding provided by:
