My work is an invitation to pause. I am drawn to spaces that seem unremarkable at first glance, places where time appears to move slowly, where the world holds its breath. Yet within that stillness, I find that something is always shifting: light changes, a surface softens, a shadow lengthens. With patient attention, the ordinary becomes quietly extraordinary.

Walking is central to how I work and how I see. I set out at a quick pace, then slow down, gradually tuning in. It is in that slowing that something opens. I begin to ask questions I had stopped asking: Is this place as familiar as I assumed? Have I cast a membrane of knowingness over it, so that I no longer truly see it? Where did my sense of wonder go?

This way of working began years ago at Crissy Field in San Francisco. I walked the same stretch of shoreline in fog and changing light, filming what most people passed by without a second look. That research became my MFA thesis, Fog. And the Whole World Stops, and the video landscapes that followed. It was there that I first understood that sustained attention to an ordinary place could become both an artistic practice and a form of inquiry.

The photographs and paintings in my practice continue that search. The series Retreating was born on a silent afternoon in June 2022, when I stood at the edge of Svínafellsjökull, a glacier in Iceland. Surrounded by ice in every shade of grey and blue, I felt time stop. In that stillness, something vast spoke of change, of fragility, of impermanence: of what endures and what does not. Each image in Retreating is a fragment of time, a quiet witness to transformation.

The ongoing Tranquility and Blue Zone photography series emerged during my 2022 artist residency in Akureyri, a town in the far north of Iceland. Its unhurried pace and close connection with the natural world reflect the qualities that Blue Zone research associates with long and meaningful lives. Every morning and afternoon, I walked the quiet paths of the botanical garden and made a conscious effort to pay attention to my breath, my thoughts and my surroundings.

Both the photographs and the paintings search for places where stillness lives, where life moves at a different pace. I don’t see them as escapes from reality. They ask us to look at it more closely. If we let them, these places can restore our sense of balance and slow the fragmentation that fast, technological life produces.

Through my work, I invite viewers to notice where tranquility already exists within and around them: in the pauses between daily tasks, in small gestures of retreat, in the way light falls across a surface and opens a small clearing for reflection. The work asks: what if longevity is counted not only in years, but in how often we allow ourselves to step aside from urgency, to listen, to be still, and to recognize slow, quiet moments as places worth returning to, again and again?

I make this work because I believe we need these moments. Looking slowly, sitting with an image and letting it unfold, is itself a form of meditation and restoration, and a small counterweight to the fragmentation of our daily lives. I hope something in these images stays with you and offers a moment of stillness you can carry with you.