I Am Your Flower Garden
My husband was diagnosed with a degenerative nerve disease called Charcot Marie Tooth when he was in his 20's. Over the past several years I have been developing a body of photographs that, in part, document the legibility of the disease on the body. It is also my intention to convey a deeper sense of the emotional implications of the disease on the family through photographs that are staged and have a narrative inclination.
My son, at seven years old, recognized the symptoms of his father's disease. He said to me not long ago that he had dreamt that his daddy grew new legs. In that same dream my son had been given a new puppy and he communicated those two fantasies with equal enthusiasm. There is recognition that in life, as in families, it can be that simple. We navigate the pain and the pleasure all at once, sometimes as if it were a dream. Some of these photographs exist in that place. There is an expressed desire to "dream away" the body that causes pain and replace it with a new physical landscape; the flower garden.
