You Can't Go Home Again.

- Thomas Wolfe

People and their homes never stay the same; our memories of place are distorted and reshaped by the stack of time. Our return is never truly possible in the way we imagine it. You can go home again but your sense of self and place can’t ever be the same.

My July 2026 exhibit, Strange Roots, is a collection of photographs depicting vague memories reshaped by the pull between past and present — tangled, twisted, complicated, and rooted somewhere between myth and memory. These images represent experiences that have both haunted and fascinated me growing up on Monhegan Island. Inspired by the gauzy, muted atmospheres and aesthetics of some of my favorite Wyeth paintings the work created for this show conjures dreamlike recollections and explores themes of faith, death, isolation, and the wonder of coming back to a place I still call home.

I am grateful to Daphne for gifting me the time, creative freedom, and space to share my work in her beautifully curated studio.

I would like to thank my fearless female models - Angela, Christian, Emily, Jackie, and Sierra — who showed up, shed their inhibitions in the chill of fading light and damp spaces, indulged my vision, and journeyed back in time to become spirits, ghosts, and playful muses.

Deep gratitude to Kole and Steph for giving me the literal space to “get er done”.

*You Have Slept on an Island (*2026)
Photo inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s *Day Dream* (1980) and my own memory of the sleeping lady (July, 1983)

I had a pony. His name was Simon.

To get to him I rowed the skiff my father made for us across the harbor to Simon’s summer island, Manana.

I wake up at dawn — that beautiful blue hour just before sunrise. It’s all about the tides. Moving with them is essential. Rowing across at high tide means less beach to haul the skiff, and it means catching that perfect swell that will gently land the skiff on one particular spot: a barnacle-crusted shelf drenched in the sway and tangle of slimy brown seaweed.

Timing is everything.

Not missing a moment of that window, I take a shortcut where the path passes a cottage. I am startled by a sleeping face framed behind squares of paned glass, slightly obscured by a gauzy white curtain. The morning breeze gently draws in and releases the fabric along with strands of long brown hair resting on the shelf of her shoulders and snaking along her neck. Her arms are tucked in. A single curve of her bare breast is visible and her presumed nakedness startles me— this woman at peace in her summer bed, asleep in the moments before wake. I am terrified her eyes will fly open.

Simon is long gone now. As summers turn to fall, he becomes a distant memory.

But the sleeping lady remains.

Her long brown hair now sparkles with silver highlights that catch the sun. Her face lined and weathered by more than seventy years of island summers. I still know her name as we pass, and she knows mine.

All these years later, I thought I had preserved her dignity.

Yet what is more dignified than the freedom of having slept naked on an island?

Strange Roots will be on display at the Edison Studio through August 9.
Opening Reception is July 22 | 4-7 pm

10% of sales will be donated to Monhegan Artists Residency.

Strange Roots: you can go home again.