When I began this series, From the Ground Up, I think I was exorcizing my own demons about
the claustrophobia of interior spaces. I find my inner peace when I step
outside and ground my anxieties in nature. I wanted to document those closed
spaces and material junk making my own (and many others’) interior spaces grow
ever smaller, causing the feeling of imprisonment in the architectural
structures of our society.
Most of my own (or other individuals’) items seem to find
their way to the floor eventually, so when I got down on the floor to
photograph my own “anxieties”, I discovered there’s an entire world and viewpoint
down there that only babies and pets (non-verbal communicators) explore on a
regular basis. Since we, as a society, don’t spend much time exploring our own
interiors from that perspective, I wanted to exploit the details I unearthed
below our feet. Those subsequent discoveries brought to light the very essence
of finding and recovering what is lost. How many times, when one finally does
get down on the floor, are we able to find that piece of jewelry that fell from
our grasp, that missing card from a vintage deck that slipped out when we
weren’t looking, or even the dirt and destruction we have left behind without
knowing it?
When I started crawling around not just my own interiors,
but my friends’ and family’s, and also more public domains in workshops,
offices, and bathrooms, I realized how futile it is that we put so much energy,
money, and supplies into building these structures to make them look as
appealing as possible so they have monetary value. Eventually, we wear down and
even destroy these shelters with our own human condition. I began to think
about the Buddhist concept of impermanence, and how we strive so hard, as a
society and as a race, to try and make things permanent. This striving is a
rather unsuccessful and vain endeavor in the end, causing more physical waste
than emotional comfort.
My conclusion in all of this led back to my original
intention of exorcizing my own demons. When the floors became so appealing as a
visual representation of much that we ignore on both a physical and emotional
level, I thought, what would happen if floors were no longer a part of our
architecture? We would return to the structural ideas of primitives or cultures
inherent to the natural world, making shelter that interacted with the native
environment and our exterior world, rather than the opposite practice of man
versus nature. Staying grounded in our social concepts would perhaps become
easier, without the distraction of trying to conquer impermanence, and
glorifying our human condition with impractical edifices and materiality. My
objective is to document that impracticality and materiality (and invade
personal and societal privacy through voyeurism) that has caused both the
physical clutter and emotional distress of our present living conditions.
