Ecology was where I started

The politics of conservation offered little room when I graduated, so I did what ecologists understand instinctively: I adapted. Half a decade in small-scale manufacturing followed. It was hands-on, process-driven, thinking carefully about what goes in and what gets left behind.

Then came the gardens. Plants taught me a rhythm dictated not by my own output, but by their response to the world they inhabit. The flowers I tended, the pets that kept clients company, the native birds overhead. These became the first subjects. I began photographing them not to share, but to study.

All the while I admired photographers and designers from a careful distance.

Then I found the machine.

A pen plotter holds a pen, follows a path, draws whatever the algorithm asks of it. The tool does the work, the human makes every other decision.

By stripping photographs down to their luminescence data, I started finding the Lock and Key moment. The essential line structure that fits the brain's pattern recognition and allows you to relive a memory rather than simply observe an image.

That discovery changed what I thought I was building.

The ecology is in the materials. The manufacturing is in the process. The design is in the symbiosis between human and their machines.