Encompassing four years of devoted documentation of the California shoreline, ‘Where Land Meets Sea’ is a photographic series chronicling my journey of meeting kin — for to know a place is to greet and recognize the many shapes and faces that live there.

This project emerged from the shoreline of North County San Diego, my hometown, but has grown with time to reach as far south as Sunset Cliffs in San Diego, and as far north as Navarro Beach in Albion. It began as a way to document my ecological homecoming as I reencountered the lands and waters of my hometown, a place that often felt alien, in my adulthood. With time, ‘Where Land Meets Sea’ began to consider the shoreline as a space of continuity: a liminal realm of constant exchange, where shared languages emerge amongst kin — a refuge for the diasporic body, who so often lives somewhere in translation. 

Skin

The Travelers

In Unison

Weaving together performance, poetry, and photography, ‘I am a Traveler’ is the retelling of my diasporic origin story: the ongoing creation of a self-mythology to make sense of my life post-rupture. Uprooted from the Earth and born in flight, I learned to find my way through the dark and follow the fractalizing paths back to the core. 

‘So for the last few years, I have lived here, deep in the world of where land meets sea. I have sat at the shoreline where stones gather in thousands, singing songs with the churning winter tides. In the spring I say goodbye, and come summer they have all gone to the deep. Year after year, we sing a similar song.’

‘Field Notes in the Vortex’  emerged from the wide open terrain of the High Desert of Southern California. The project spans writing, photography, performance, and artifact collecting as a means of documenting the evolution of my relationship to the land and my process of meeting kin. These field notes are insights into the metaphysical, as the body surrenders and portals open as time and space shift and bend; stories about intimate encounters with fellow desert beings and bodies; and learnings I've cultivated as a child of diaspora about the rituals and processes that allow us to root and find belonging, wherever we are.