Landlines

Who I am was transformed the first time I saw mountains on the horizon. Growing up in rural Ohio, I was always drawn to wide-open spaces—sweeping expanses where lines and layers stretched in every direction. The woods never called to me; I longed for distance, for the majesty and mystery of vistas that revealed more the farther you looked. The first time I felt the pull of mountains, I changed everything to follow it. I would drive a thousand miles just to sit at the base of a vast range for five quiet minutes. No place on earth brings me more awe, joy, or steadiness than staring into an abyss of rolling lines, tones stacked like whispers, forms dissolving into pure rhythm and color. That view is rivaled only by the endless horizon of Lake Michigan—sky folding into water, a meeting of infinities. Both remind me of the same truth: that the grandeur of the earth is beyond my comprehension, and that I am, all at once, insignificant and enough.

As an artist searching for voice through practice, I follow where the heart leads. These contours, these undulating horizons, return to me again and again—in paintings, in photographs, and in the most unexpected corners of daily life. I see these “landlines” in the morning sky above my kitchen window, in the tree line at dusk as I drive through my hometown, and most spectacularly, etched in the sand on a stormy autumn day along Lake Michigan, when the world felt particularly heavy. Perhaps it was the universe offering me a way back to center, or perhaps it was my own heart insisting on awe.

This series of photographs is an act of witnessing—field notes from a transitional season of becoming. To me, these lines in the sand are both ephemeral and eternal: a record of pattern and rhythm, a reminder that even as we shed old selves and surrender them to the water, beauty continues to reveal itself in repetition. When we pay attention, we can see the quiet geometry of our lives more clearly—and in that recognition, begin to make sense of what it means to be human.