WILD SPIRITS
Light and Shadow in the Georgia Sea Islands
“We are fallen in mostly broken pieces…but the wild can still return us to ourselves.” ~ Robert Macfarlane
I was introduced to the Sea Islands while attending an artists’ retreat on Ossabaw Island, one of the barrier islands lying off the southeast coast of the United States. The islands have a long history, first occupied for millennia by indigenous peoples, followed by centuries of European incursion, land grants, enslavement, sharecropping, private ownership, and, lately, important efforts to restore the ecology and to preserve and honor the histories.
Ossabaw is now mostly uninhabited, but was at one time a cotton plantation, a science research station, and an artists’ colony, among other identities. It is dense with trees, swamps, rookeries, birds, feral and wild critters, broken places, bones, shells, flowers, mosses, ferns, snakes, alligators, and insects. Exploring this and other untamed places in the Sea Islands, I felt a presence of the spirit of these earlier generations of people, and of the land and its creatures. The beauty of the sea and marshes, the trees, birds, and animals captivated me, as did the wild and possibly true tales we heard from local sources.
The photographs, some made in collaboration with other artists, are a fable of love for wild spirits and mysterious places, arising from memory, dreams, tall tales, and music. They are a story of loss of freedom, destruction of nature, and hope for restoration and redemption, in the extraordinary island light that reveals, conceals, and sometimes, heals.
