AfterLife focuses on the absence of human bodies to observe the ongoing presences that shape the landscapes around us, revealing how ceremony and tradition define the grieving process.
In July 2021, I captured photographs, recorded sound, and extracted soil from the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility (FARF) in San Marcos, Texas, a site reserved for studying variations of post-mortem intervals.
Photographs of prairie grass and sagewort render exchanges between humans and environments visible. Echoes of arrested human life emerge, witnessed as broad swaths of vegetation or wired cages unable to contain the life that thrives within them. In the images, decomposed bodies emerge from the soil as wildflowers, native grasses, and wiry sprigs of Juniper Ash. A song of Cicadas is occasionally ruptured by the sounds of my body extracting soil and taking the photographs viewers observe. The rolling hills of San Marcos, Texas, through their flourishing communities, and as living portraits of exchange and transformation, challenge existing relationships with death processing, burial practices, and the procedures and traditions these experiences manifest.
