this personal project was discovered by and featured in confluence magazine in 2019.
Sol Gardens is a small-scale organic farm in Yorkville, Illinois, run by Kris, Joel the beekeeper's good friend. The honey season kicked off in March, when Joel cleared a new space for the hive boxes on the grounds of Sol Gardens, and wrapped up with the last harvest of honey in October. I documented a lot of the farm during this project, and I found it fascinating to watch the season progress in multiple ways.
I reflect upon what this whole process has meant to me, and how I will present this project to my mentor. While it is certainly a documented season of small-scale honey production, it is also more than that. When I think about what I want to share with an audience I think about this farmland and this season that has passed, and all that went on there. I think about people working in the rhythm of the seasons, their livelihood depending on things like late spring snowfalls, droughts and floods, extremes of heat, powerful storms: all things outside of their control. These people work within a level of connection to the world around them that is no longer the norm in the suburbs of the USA. In a land of cubicles and parking lots and buildings, this life offers a return to connection to the larger world in which we reside.
I think about this space too as a place where so many worlds come together - man, animal, and plant - each working with the other to produce food, sustenance, livelihood…with the exchange of pollen at the epicenter of it all.
Artist Statement:
Remember the first time you were taught about fractals? You see this image that looks random and abstract, but when you start to zoom in this incredible beauty and magic and order suddenly appears and then it happens again. and again. and again. each unseen world emerges anew seemingly out of nowhere - but of course it didn't - because the whole of the structure is built entirely upon its own repetition.
In 2018, I had the privilege of finding a fractal of good in a time of persistent disorientation.
By zooming in, away from the random and chaotic national level, in towards my own local level, I've been fortunate enough to discover some really good honey, some really good people, tens of thousands of beautiful and mysterious little insects, and one amazing goodness fractal. If I can, as a photographer, hold a mirror to that for others to see, and perhaps as well reflect this back to those within it, then I have done something that I feel really good about. Thanks to Joel, the beekeeper, and Kris, the organic farmer, for setting up the neon welcome sign at the fractal opening, and for being my friends.