These pieces were selected for the Emerging Photographer Showcase as part of the 2025 Exposure Photography Festival at Contemporary Calgary.

This body of work uses film photography to make colonial histories visible through the invasive species that thrive in disturbed environments, such as the former sites of industry and resource extraction that took off during the intensive settlement of BC during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Taking brickyards, coal mines, railway tracks and bridges as my subjects, I explore spaces that have been ‘returned to nature’ through becoming parks, conservation sites, and ‘greenways’ for bikes and pedestrians. However, the 'nature' that has reclaimed the land is not the same as the native ecologies that existed before they were colonized. I use invasives like dandelion, ‘white man’s footsteps’ or broadleaf plantain, and blackberry to develop and/or interrupt these images so that the plants leave their mark on this surfacing or re-imaging of history. Using double exposures allows me to overlay histories and ecologies: sites of industry, settlement, and colonization overlap with native and invasive plants.

By using site-specific plants, and invasives in particular, I engage critically with photography, whose development reflects its own particular relationship with colonization through documentation, categorization, and control of the ‘other.’ I seek ways to avoid the toxic nature of traditional darkroom processes by using plants as developers, embracing the imperfections and serendipity that come with materially-oriented process, and the challenge to a sense of ‘realness’ that comes through the resulting images which reflect a more complicated, messy history.