The inspiration for this series came from learning about mbari houses created by the Igbo in Nigeria. Six months after an mbari house’s creation they are intentionally abandoned, essentially sacrificed to mother nature.

 

With this in mind, I began thinking about the unintentional abandonment that litters so much of our world, lost in thoughts of the temporal moments that occurred in these spaces. To gather imagery for the series, I took photographs of three different abandoned buildings all located on the same property in Amherst, Virginia. In capturing these photos, the spaces gave birth to these six new moments, and in painting the scenes, they have become semi-permanent fixtures of places that have been long forgotten.