The Saugatuck Cosmology

This project began with winter walks along the Saugatuck River and the vibrant yet peaceful beauty of the moving waters, the play of light, and the rendering of time in the moment and the millennium.  These images are grounded in my photographs of the waterfalls, and I turned to digital methods as an avenue into the emotional and sensory, near hypnotic, effects of the cascading waters.  Process became a search for meaning in the repetitive beauty of falling water.  The representations of what the camera saw passed into virtual space, were mixed with memory and experience, and were returned as printed works. The making of these images carried me beyond the camera to the energy of the flowing water and the life forces that have for centuries nurtured all that lives along the riverbanks. As I look into these waters, I am reminded that the river nurtured indigenous cultures for thousands of years.  The most recent were the Paugussetts who gave us the word “saugatuck” meaning flowing waters.  And so, this body of work looks to the intersection of time and light and water to ask difficult questions and possibly find some level of understanding as to what has gone before and the uncertainties that lie ahead.

The project evolved into the making of a book, The Saugatuck Cosmology, in collaboration with the author Ted Wade.