“Lake Eden”

Since moving to North Carolina in 2011 I have made regular pilgrimages to Lake Eden to experience the landscape which roused and provided refuge for generations of experimental artists. My focus has been to observe the unique features of the environment, as well as the original structures, built by Black Mountain College students and faculty, which were so attentively nestled throughout the campus.

The titles of many of my images reference works made by these artists including Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Creeley, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Olson,  Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, Gwendolyn Lawrence, Jacob Lawrence, Kenneth Noland, Barbara Morgan, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Susan Weil, and Marion Post Wolcott among many others.  My intent has been to make images in dialogue with the College’s experimental ethos and to allow the landscape to affect me as well as my camera.

While this project focuses on Lake Eden and Black Mountain College specifically, the philosophy of the school permeates the whole of my practice as an artist and as a teacher. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.” As a photographer, this rings particularly true to me. No single moment can be replicated; the light will never be the same again; I will never see this combination of shadows again; I will never be the exact person that I am in this moment again.

Goethe, Emerson, Dewey, Albers – a lineage of seers preaching the same gospel across time. Teach yourself to see, and the world will open to you. The 1951 BMC Summer Session Bulletin describes the focus of the photography classes similarly: “We try to become alert and watchful of the world around us, and we begin to see. The world is open wide to the photographer who can see. And one can never be bored if one can see.”

This quote also inspired the exhibition “Begin to See: The Photographers of Black Mountain College” curated by Julie J. Thomson. Thomson’s exhibition was the first to focus on the photographic output of the College. I couldn’t have made this work without spending many hours at Lake Eden, but without the Thomson exhibit I wouldn’t know the full extent of the history of photography at BMC. I have her to thank for my photographs, as well as the generous staff at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and Camp Rockmont.

I will continue to make my pilgrimages to Lake Eden as long as Musuem + Arts Center keeps providing tours. There’s still much to see at Lake Eden, and I suspect there always will be.