Fortitude is a series of images of impromptu driftwood huts. The huts project security and fantasy, offset by precarious construction of dilapidated materials in an eroding landscape to create a sense of unease for environmental uncertainty. Fortitude displays the collective history of driftwood from familiar natural and manipulated sources, in a revolving collaboration between trees, ocean, sand, wind, weather, and strangers. Fortitude is a portmanteau of fort and attitude, and a word describing the resilience required to seek and sustain shelter and safety on this entropic planet. There is a secondary sad secret allusion to the fortitude required to keep building secure structures as they continuously get taken away. Soon after the huts get built, occupied, and enjoyed; they inevitably fall from tempestuous weather, rising tides, shifting sand, eroding coast, and the poaching of one hut’s wood for another. Fortitude displays the (un)natural and (de)constructive lives of large trees in this liminal landscape between where we were, where we are, and where we are going; inviting viewers to experience, empathize, and engage with their role in the imminent. These images of trees as (in)secure structures in a visibly deteriorating environment communicate their need to be protected to provide protection.

Learn more here