Metabolism is my new exhibition and photo series in conjunction with the ArtHeals™ Art Exhibition Program curated by Judith Rayl. The exhibition runs October 2025 to about April 2025 at Bainbridge Island Fire Department Station 21: 8895 N Madison Ave NE, Bainbridge Island WA.
Photo Books: Because the exhibition is not open to the public, I’ll make signed and unsigned photo books of this series available for purchase on this page. Stay tuned for more about those.
Artist & Curator Talks: I’ll also be planning a series of free, open to the public talks over the next month in the greater Seattle area and streamed online.
~Star
Metabolism
Artist Statement for Metabolism
Metabolism is as much about the metabolism of perception and memory as it is about the metabolism of matter. I made these photographs between the two places where I lived for 20 years: my home in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle and my beach house in Bay Center, a small town on the Washington coast of about 300 people. I took most of these photographs between 2019–2022 when I lived alone with my dog, Kingston, in my small beach house along Willapa Bay and the edge of the Willapa Hills. In solitude, I watched the sea, trees, weather—and in those observations found within me a landscape that mirrored what I saw outside.
The photographs here document the material world and the interior terrain I moved through, sat still with, wanted to make meaning of during a time of isolation both private and public. The dissolution of my long relationship intersected with the pandemic, when my personal passages became about moving, even languidly, with and through the unknown. To make these photographs was to look out far and look in deep—all at once. What you see is what I found: ordinariness at the threshold of becoming–and myself.
I’m curious about liminality—thresholds. What is neither here nor there? What is both yet neither? Metabolism is one name for it: breaking down, building up, releasing and taking in—energy. Even loss is metabolized. Even loss is alive.
Excerpt from the Photo Book essay:
. . . There is also a psychological dimension. These images operate as documents of natural process but also as meditations on interior states: grief, uncertainty, memory, impermanence. The fog that swallows a horizon echoes the opacity of the future. The stump’s hollow core mirrors the way absence shapes presence. The forest’s density enacts the tension between being held and being lost. Metabolism is as much about the metabolism of perception and memory as it is about the metabolism of matter. . .