Other corners of the earth (2024 - 2026)
40”x32” inkjet print

Other corners of the earth is an ongoing series of experimental large format photography that explores cartography, extraction, and the concept of “real” nature. The prints are the cut film negatives and prints of wetlands and grasslands made using cartographic delineations, specific to the site of the photograph.

In 2024 I travelled within Mi’kma’ki to photograph wetlands, salt marshes, fens, and bogs. In 2025 I travelled to Treaty 4, 6, and 7 territory to photograph both wetlands and grasslands. Using various digital maps I “revisited” locations I photographed via the internet, and created tracings of the areas marked as wetlands and grasslands. I used these drawings to cut the negatives using a tabletop plotter. I am interested in how the visualization of loss affects the images. While photographs are understood to be representations, the permanent censorship of the image is felt as a violence towards the subject matter. In this way, the photographs communicate the loss created by extraction in a way that we are able to comprehend.  The work explores the consequences of extraction, the passive violence of human-oriented boundaries, and the slippery definition of wilderness.

This project was initially inspired by the culling of photographic negatives by Roy Stryker, head of the information division at the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the ecological disaster termed “The Dust Bowl”. Stryker systematically hole-punched negatives sent to him by FSA photographers to “kill” them, marking them as images that were not to be published. I became interested in working in a similar way during the Alberta and Saskatchewan drought in 2023, with the intention of using colour film.

By using cartographic boundaries to cut the film, the extractive cost of relying on binary delineation to describe complex ecosystems is illustrated. Additionally, grasslands and wetlands occupy a transitory space in the cultural understanding of wilderness. Both do not typically fulfill the requirements for “wilderness” because of their proximity to human activity such as agriculture, highways, and urban development. As a consequence, these lands are at greater risk because of their status as not “real” nature and therefore expendable. As William Cronon explains in The Trouble with Wilderness (1996), “if we set too high a stock on wilderness, too many other corners of the earth become less than natural and too many other people become less than human”. My work questions these binary definitions (wild and not-wild, protected and not-protected) and hierarchies of nature, which silently give permission to act irresponsibly outside of the established boundaries.