I am trying to visually represent a sense of my personal spirituality. This spirituality comes from my belief in the secret forces of nature. Sometimes when I am in the woods I imagine that I can hear the trees breathing. When the wind gentle rustles the leaves I imagine the resulting sound are the trees talking to one another or to me. When I lie down on the ground I can feel the earth breath like someone's chest moving up and down and I can hear and feel the earth's heart beat. I inhale the smell of the decaying leaves and dirt like it is. I welcome humidity because I can actually feel the air. This is the spirit of nature, the idea that the earth and all things that grow upon it are alive and breathing and seem to take on an anthropomorphic character. This is what my art is about. The fairy is just a body to contain this spirit. It is something to represent the abstract concept of spirituality so in the fairy I am trying to represent the imaginary embodiment of the spirit of nature.

I am inspired by the fantasy imagery and animism that developed in Austria out of a cultural fear of death resulting from tears of cultural, political, and religious unrest. I will discuss some of the themes in Gustav Klimt's work as they are born out of this Austrian legacy. I have also become interested in the spiritual relationship between the painters of the Hudson River School and the American landscape. I have also noted some nineteenth century ideas about the negative effects of industrialism on the landscape depicted in the American landscapes of George Innes and in Klimt's landscapes. I have found inspiration in the work of Joyce Tenneson as her work represents her own lifelong spiritual journey. Finally, I would like to comment on my use of the Van Dyke Brown Process in the creation of my final body of work.

Over the course of this semester I have been struggling to figure out exactly what I am doing when I make the images I do. I feel that through the process of this self-scrutiny and dissection I have been able to move past my fear of death because I have come closer to my ultimate beliefs about spirituality. As my work has evolved from otherworldly, documentary to spiritual landscape I have been able to allow myself to transcend the documentary world of reality and people and finally become part of a spiritual world. My fear of death has subsided, as I have been able to let go of this world of every day life and familiarity, and face the unknown.

My work has undergone great metamorphosis, and consequently so has my conception of human existence. Before my work was grounded in death as the ultimate end, in both my fear of death and my attachment to life. Now my work is built on the metamorphosis of human existence of which death is just one stage, and the cyclic nature of all existence. It is for this reason that I have chosen to include the fairy in my work. I chose the fairy to represent the spirit of nature because to me fairies represent more than just their superficial popular notions. I see the body of the fairy to be a human in a hybrid form. My fairies wings resemble the wings of an insect, such as those of a fly, in that they are transparent. She represents a metamorphosis in this characteristic, in the sense of the metamorphosis that insects undergo throughout the various stages of their lifespan. I am referring to the literal transformation from the egg to the larva, to the pupa, and finally the adult fly. I am not however saying that the fairy goes through the same process I am just referencing the process of transformation from one state to another. The biological definition of metamorphosis is a profound change in form from one stage to the next in the life history of an organism. The fairy being the embodiment of nature also represents the cyclical transformation of nature in the changing of the seasons.

I have found a relationship with the art that was produced in Vienna throughout the nineteenth century in their fantastic imagery. A theme in the development of Austrian fantasy is the fear of death instilled in the city as everywhere there are constant reminders of the city's plight from the memory of the religious invasions and massacre as they were the eastern most capitol of Christianity for a time to the plague monument in the heart of down town Vienna. From this fear of death and the need to escape it encouraged flight from reality. It was my own fear of death that kept me attached to making art about the things of life and reality, but eventually I looked for an escape and decided to create a fantastic world which soon became instilled with spirituality. I was able to make my own connection between my bond with nature and an image from traditional fantasy, the fairy. At first the fairy was simply a character in my fantastic world but then she came to represent so much more, she became the embodiment of nature, and my work became more about my connection to the transcendental spirit of nature than of my previous works in fear of death, or those that were escape from death through fantasy.

In my images I am trying to show the spirit of nature in the embodiment of it rather than in the Grandiose awe of depictions of landscapes such as those of the Hudson River painters. The paintings of Thomas Cole especially emulate this emotional stimulation from the grandeur of the untouched American landscape. In his painting , Catskill Mountain House , Cole depicts a large mountain rising up from the Hudson river, followed by more mountains gently disappearing into the distance. In the foreground Cole includes two hikers to demonstrate the small scale of human beings compared to the grand scale of the landscape, which is divinely created. From his Essay on American Scenery, Cole says, "those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, affect the mind with a more deep toned emotion than aught which the hand of man has touched. Amid them the consequent associations are of God the creator-they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things." Here Cole is discussing his feelings on how the beauty of untouched nature is more emotionally striking than anything that could be created by man, and this distinction represents the power of the divine creator over man, and emphasizes Cole's point that it is this divine beauty that causes the mind to contemplate eternal things, perhaps such as life, death, and existence.

Because I feel such a strong connection to nature I feel that the destruction of it is in a way the destruction of myself. I feel, so strongly, that I am a part of nature, that I will not be able to exist in a completely man made environment. I sympathize with some nineteenth century artists who were effected by the encroaching industrialism and included these sentiments in their art work.
George Inness and his painting The Lackawanna Valley (1856) depicts the image of a sweeping landscape with a steam engine cutting across mid-ground and behind it lie a scattering of buildings all emitting some sort of smoke. It seems as though there is smoke emanating from the forest covering the mountains in the background. All of this smoke rises into the air giving it a hazy atmosphere and a dirty green hue. In addition the hillside in the foreground is covered with tree stumps. This image has been interpreted as celebrating the power of man over nature, and was in fact commissioned by the railroad companies in Scranton, Pennsylvania. However, the depiction of the sky, clearly is commenting on how industrialism is destroying the beautiful American landscape. This Painting is representative of a crucial dilemma that confronted many people in the nineteenth century, especially in America, that of expansion necessitating the destruction of nature.

Another artist that I feel a connection with is Gustav Klimt, particularly in his early landscapes but I am also drawn to his commitment to the metamorphic cycle of life. In his painting the Three Ages of Woman, "the contrast between the stylized girl and the naturalistic old woman has a symbolic value the first phase of life is characterized by an infinite number of possibilities and metamorphoses, while the last phase is marked by an unchangeable uniformity that does not allow one to escape confrontation with reality". Klimt sees life filled with different stages that people morph from one to the other but this stops at the onset of old age when we are brought back to the reality of life in the face of death. I have come to see death as another stage in the metamorphic cycle of life, like the seasons there is the birth of spring, the youth of summer, the old age of autumn and the death of winter.

Kilmt's landscape paintings are connected to his ideas about human life through two concepts, that organic life exists outside and independent of man-made history, and the idea of natural history as a cyclical process of never ending growth. Klimt's lack of human presence in his landscapes is evidence that when "confronted with the increasing exploitation of nature and the feeling that it is under mounting threat, we tend to feel a growing yearning for a 'pure' unadulterated nature, forever renewing itself, as it were, from its own resources". His landscapes were influenced by the impending destruction of industrialism, and he chose to counteract this destruction by creating completely organic depictions of the landscape that are in the process of endless renewal. I have attempted to create a scene saturated with nature and free from any traces of human presence. Because such a natural view free from houses and roads to cars or even humans is uncommon in the everyday lives of most people I feel that this absence will be noticed and will reflect my feelings about the destruction of nature.

I am inspired by the work of Joyce Tenneson and it's reflection of her own spiritual journey, as my work is a result of the progression of a spiritual journey of my own. I also relate to her interest in the metamorphosis of the human body, and her ability to depict timeless figures by way of their nudity and also in their reference to an anonymous myth. I am particularly drawn to her use of light to represent spirituality for example in the image Woman and Light Hat. She creates an aura of light around a hat in the shape of a nun's hat, which creates the effect of light actually emanating from the hat or from the head of the woman. She is using this light to instill a kind of spirituality into the image and perhaps into the woman herself.

In my image of the four fairies over the pond I have tried to create a similar effect by placing the fairies within their own halo of lightness as if they might glow. I want them to emanate the spiritual light as to heighten their purpose as embodying the spirit of nature incarnate. They are like little points of light within the landscape, or magical sparks of radiant energy. Tenneson's image alludes to a divine presence in her use of Christian imagery, an influence of her childhood growing up surrounded by the mysterious world of convent life. I am less interested in the imagery of traditional Christianity and more interested in instilling a sense of animism, the belief that natural phenomena or inanimate objects possess spirits into my images.

To make my images I have chosen to print them using an alternative photographic process called Van Dyke Brown for two reasons. The first reason is because I am bored with the traditional method using regular photographic paper, printed in the dark room from the original negative. The Vandyke brown process is interesting and exciting because of the variations of possible steps involved to make the final image. I began by shooting black and white images of a figure dressed like a fairy, in the woods and then printed the picture traditionally in the dark room before inputting it into the computer. Recently I began creating images by shooting with a digital camera and also shooting the landscape and figures separately in order to construct the scene in the computer. Both processes result in the printing of an enlarged negative printed on a transparency from the computer printer. I have found the digital method to be more practical. The next reason why I am using this alternative process is because I am interested in the dialogue that is created between my entirely digitally constructed imagery and the seemingly historical appearance of the final object. In her article discussing some of the contemporary artists who are working with historical photographic processes, Aura Fixation: Old Technology for New Photography, Jane Harris notes, "Artists working with forms that hark back to photography's origins do so because it allows them an intimacy with the medium that is lost in the world of digital [media]". She says, "people are attracted to what appears sincere, stable, and familiar in the face of change." I want to instill a sense of photographic truth to my photographs by referencing the origins of photography through the final outcome of the Van Dyke brown process. The historical method would be to use a large format camera and paper negatives. I am modifying the process to the conveniences of our time but I am still trying to reference the original nature of the process.

I am not using the Vandyke brown method in an attempt to make fake fairy photographs reminiscent of the Cottingly Fairies faked by two young girls in England in the nineteenth century. I am not trying to prove the existence of fairies by representing them photographically. I do not truly believe that fairies exist in real life. They are imaginary beings. They are like the caricature of the spirit of nature. My pictures are not about fairies, they are about my personal spiritual bond with nature.