This ongoing durational project began in 2010 when I started documenting a single tree during my graduate studies. The tree existed literally between my past and future selves, marking the physical and psychological space of transformation. What started as personal ritual has become a meditation on time, change, and the recognition that we never truly arrive at who we want to become—we’re always in transit. The documentation continues, the collection now numbering over 1200 photographs. From these, eight different mosaic configurations emerge, each using 1600 images through repetition and recombination. In this way, the process echoes how memory exists—returning to the same moments again and again, each time seeing them differently, each recombination revealing new patterns and meanings. The mosaic format collapses years of encounters into single viewing experiences, suggesting that the most meaningful growth occurs not in singular moments but through sustained commitment to showing up at the spaces that hold our questions, seeing them again and again, finding new significance in repetition itself.
I’m standing in the gallery looking at my own photographs framed on the wall, fifteen years of that tree, like a repeater station that extends the range of the images - receiving them on one frequency and re-transmitting them to another in my subconscious, and somewhere in those 1200 images is a version of me who stopped going back, who took the last picture and moved on, and another me who never started at all, who drove past that tree every day and kept driving, never once lifting the camera, and they’re both here somehow in the negative space between exposures, in the days I didn’t shoot, the days the light was wrong or I was too tired or forgot, and I can see them clearly—the me who gave up and the me who never tried—standing together in the parking lot of some other life comparing notes on what it feels like to not be caught in this orbit, this elliptical return I can’t stop making, and I’m considering them both, their freedom to not care, to not keep showing up at the same threshold over and over, but here I am in the gallery watching viewers look at what all that returning produced, and those other me’s fade back into the static, back into the might-have-beens, while I stay here with the only thing I know how to do: keep coming back, keep looking, keep trying to see what I’m becoming.