This collection of photographs is an ongoing project that explores ideas about womanhood, sisterhood, loss, and reclamation. I connect personal stories and experiences—specifically those of women as sisters, mothers, or daughters—through my photographs. My roots in the land of the Southwest, where I am from, are what carried me through a time of loss and led to this self-discovery. By photographing members of my family and friends, weaving their images, nature portraits, and self-portraits, I question the layered ways in which we are connected and shaped by an absence.

I began this project by photographing my teenage stepdaughters as a way of understanding their relationship to each other as sisters. I was initially drawn to photographing my daughters because it allowed me into their lives during a time when they were starting to grow up and separate. It also permitted me to follow my curiosity about what it means to be a teenage girl in a religiously conservative and homogenous town. Over time it became a way for me to understand them in a more profound way. The experience ultimately led me to seek to understand myself and my own experience growing up with sisters in a Mormon household in the same town.

The terrain of Southern Utah has offered me a sense of grounding and foundation, but I did not fully understand until later in my research the significance that place has had on shaping my identity. I use photography as a way to question how landscape can inform our ways of being, in particular, contrasted with a small town that is strongly shaped by a religious culture and identity. In my practice, I took my self-portrait work out of the domestic space and placed myself and other female figures in nature as a way of exploring how the loss of religious expectations can lead to a sense of freedom and understanding of self. The women I photographed function as individual portraits and also as stand ins for myself.