Not long ago, it became clear that my sparse excursions into the mountains of Vermont had begun to gain an acute sense of new discovery, even in the face of approaching something so deeply familiar. It wasn’t until I found myself marching through snowdrifts half the height of my body that I began to recognize the truth about what I’d so sadly written off as one of the final bastions of my youth. My grandparents' aging cottage, so far removed from the drudgery of city life, began to reveal itself as if it were an old and frightened creature -- tired, hungry and weak in the knees.

As I had done so many times before, I found myself digging out the front door, lighting newspaper for the fire, plugging in the water pump, and turning the heat to a mild 67 degrees. In little time, I could hear the house breathing hot air, puffing out its chest like an old man refusing to accept his wrinkles.

And then, as if it been waiting for someone, sections of floors and walls began to light up with the sunlight swimming in through cheap windows and lace curtains. The house had awoken again.

My work in and around my grandparents’ cottage in East Jamaica, Vermont slowly evolved from the definitive example of my own stubborn reluctance to accept impermanence into something far greater. Each meditative drive from the busy interstate to the densely forested yard had revealed more and more about the resilience of things and the silent enchantment of nature. The humming sounds of the tiny closet furnace, the impermeable cloud of inky darkness at night, the sunlight drifting over brush and snowbanks, the watchful eyes of the various animal sculptures within, the taste of water sitting in copper pipes for months on end -- such factors lead to my furthering the insistence that the house itself and its surroundings were still alive and speaking.

With these photographs, I hoped to communicate an insistence of life in the secluded and rarely touched area. By collecting these images, both directed and otherwise, I hoped to construct a working narrative of the house that resonates dually within myself, on a personal level, but also on a level of universal human understanding of the temporary quality of objects.

Through my exploration, the house itself had become much like an old relative, whose brilliant life and necessary death became subject to my documentation. For each example of new plant growth, of wildlife, of self-portraiture, there are examples of dust, of decay, and of objects going untouched. I hope to impart this same realization of time upon the viewer, building up a more thorough understanding of how things begin, and how we must accept each ending with thoughtful grace.