Winter Lake is a meditation on the spare, serene beauty of an oak bottoms in wintertime.

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This open land is just a few miles from my city home and is bordered by an industrial district, but it feels like a wild place. In spring, the air is filled with the songs of migrating birds and the land quietly wakens. In summer, grasses grow tall and wetlands become dry, and the understory of the woodland is lush and green. In fall, geese graze in the fields and take to the air in a rowdy honking mass at a singular moment when the sun dips beneath the horizon. 

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I revel in this place through all the seasons, but I especially love it in winter, when the land is resonant with sleeping life. The bare trees and dried grasses create elegant patterns against the pale sky, the geese are on their way to other places, and the rains create shallow lakes buzzing with activity. I can walk alone, bundle up against the rain and cold, hear the crunch of dried matter underfoot, and listen to the quietest places of my mind.

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For this project, I incorporated the physicality of this place by using acorns of the white oak to tone cyanotype prints. These prints are literally made of the place they come from.