In the years since I moved into a house with a back yard, I became obsessed with gardening, but it felt like a dirty secret. I spent hours digging, demolishing, and watering things, guiltily, while feeling I should be doing something else. The garden was an indulgence, a distraction from work, even as it became a kind of therapy for the anxiety I carried with me.
As the Covid lockdown began, the distinction between work and everything else suddenly collapsed. My professional life had withered, but it was spring, and the plants in my yard were beginning to grow. I found myself yearning for a sense of structure and started waking before dawn to spend the early morning outside, cutting, stacking, and pinning together mismatched materials – garden blooms, domestic objects, suburban waste - in the hope that they would remain tethered long enough to compose a picture. Building and photographing these temporary sculptures became a morning ritual, a form of work I had invented for myself and had to finish before the wind came in from the bay and the rising sun wilted whatever blossoms I had chosen to clip.
I started inserting surveillance cameras into the sculptures, imagining they possessed the optics to return my gaze. As I faced them with a moan or a scowl and documented their growth, they in turn recorded my movements and gestures. The sculptures became both subjects and witnesses.
In the book, surveillance images of me captured by my sculptures are folded between my photographs of the sculptures. The gaze moves in two directions rather than one. What began as a way of making pictures in the yard became an experiment in portraiture: two ways of looking at the same person at the same moment, one made by me, and one made by the things I built.
