Where the Grid Ends, 2022
Where the Grid Ends, explores the horror women can experience in urban wooded areas by looking at Manhattan's Inwood Hill Park. Inwood Hill is the last natural forest and salt marsh on the island of Manhattan; I was drawn to the park because of my childhood, largely spent outside in South Georgia. The dense canopy, unexpectedly located above the city’s orderly grid at the northernmost point of the island, provides an eerie sense of concealment and vulnerability. My medium format, black and white images echo this sentiment with darker exposures, capturing the more uncanny and fearful sites within the park. History of Inwood Hill, going back to the 1950s, reveals a series of violent attacks against women. How can a place that is supposed to offer peace and respite simultaneously be a place of fear, especially for female-identifying park goers? The trees seem to whisper of something ominous and approaching footsteps are deadened by soft dirt. It’s an unexpected feeling of solitary unease in a city where you are hardly alone. My images focus on these moments where past acts of violence seem to have seeped into the soil with the only indicator of their happening lying in a crumpled newspaper or hanging rope. Influenced by my journalism background, the images are paired alongside archival materials from my research as well as text, which contextualizes the images with historical explanations and descriptions of feelings evoked from being in the park. These mediums come together in book format where images of an idyllic park are put into perspective by the reveal of a violent history.
