I Can’t Live Here Anymore
I Can’t Live Here Anymore is a collaborative work in progress made with the assistance and grace of Caitlyn Kingery.
After investigating a series of accidental deaths caused by tree strikes, in the winter of 2023-2024 I began documenting the woods of my hometown in northeast Ohio. I started tracing connections between the environmental decay of Ohio’s parks to the reproductive healthcare crisis that was filling the state with overflowing doom. After my own miscarriage in 2021, I have found myself constantly grappling with my ability to remain in the state of Ohio - unsure if remaining in my hometown could indirectly act as a death sentence.
My anxiety about the trees began to act as a distraction for my anxiety about my miscarriage. I couldn’t help but wonder, was the landscape aware of the disarray it sat within? What were the trees themselves, holding onto? I was projecting my own anxieties and fears about the future into the trees, convinced that they must have somehow known disaster was stirring - that these senseless deaths were warnings to leave.
615 miles away from Canton, Ohio, in North Augusta, South Carolina, a young woman who shared my first name was struggling with a very different form of despair regarding her relationship to her hometown. Caitlyn Kingery, a long time friend of mine, has spent the last decade of her life searching relentlessly for her mother Tammy, after she disappeared in 2014.
Tammy Kingery too, seemed to be consumed by the trees - while local police enforcement did little to continue their search for her. I drove to South Carolina to be with Caitlyn, to see her and make art together after two years. As I drove down, a series of strange events triggered a building tension in Tammy’s case.
Together, we've made images as the chaos of our hometowns weighs upon us. The photographs that have followed are frantic documentations of the environment directly related to our stories, intermixed with highly controlled, staged portraits - all made while hiking deep into the woods during the winter hunting season.
Edition #2 of I Can’t Live Here Anymore was featured in the group exhibition of External Maternal in Chicago, 2024