Dark Matter 2015-present
“Jocelyn Lee’s images are borne of nature. To walk into a room lit with her work is to look out at the universe itself—planets and moons, bright galaxies, nebulae, dark matter—all of it expanding, so much to examine that we are no mere onlookers but nineteenth-century naturalists engrossed with our telescopes or perusing our cabinets of wonders, our halls of biodiversity…..
For Jocelyn, portraits are a kind of still life, and still-lifes a kind of portrait. It was barely a leap from the troughs to her interest in human bodies, our own temporality, our blooming and fading, our collective stories, which are all the same in the end: we come, we go, wisdom accruing, skin sagging, liquids seeking their level, gases in, gases out, the fruit that we are, the petals of us, the leaves and bark…
”
ONGOING
My Husband’s Garden (based on the Dark Matter series) – a collaborative project by Jocelyn Lee and Brian Urquhart
I married for the second time in 2015 and felt compelled to save the wedding flowers. Photography has always been a form of preservation for me, a way of slowing the world down and suspending it, allowing me time to look at things that interest me again and again. In this instance, I wasn’t ready to let go of these flowers (or the moment they celebrated), so I placed them in a large tub of water in my yard and visited them daily. It was October and the weather was quietly shifting—warm days turned to cold nights and the flowers responded. Quickly I realized something interesting was happening. Flower bodies decay differently: some contracted into tight, mushy masses of color, while others became dissolute and thin, veil-like and drained of color. Some rose and pooched, while others sank and flattened. Depending on the time of day and quality of light, the theater of floating beings told different narratives. I began to photograph.
Meanwhile, my husband Brian began to garden. We had moved to Maine in 2014 and graduated from tending a small patch of yard in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, to nearly two acres in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Brian dug deep and embraced the earth that surrounded us. He planted bare root apple, pear, and peach trees as well as myriads of berries bought from Fedco, a gardening collective in Maine. He began pruning and restoring the neglected and ancient apple trees that surround our property to reveal others hidden beneath invasive masses of bittersweet, feral raspberry, Norway maple and thorny barberry. He built food gardens, where he grew vegetables from seed such as kale, tomato, lettuce, eggplant, and potato.
In time flowers began to appear: sunflowers, dahlias, false indigo, poppy, foxglove, delphinium, lupine, hyssop, Japanese irises and in spring masses of daffodils and tulips. One year Brian planted 200 tulips, a secret act hidden from the family until the following Spring. As the fruit trees took hold and grew despite many losses and replacements due to deer and borers, a march of unusual trees and conifers appeared, creating pathways and gentle borders between our property and the neighbors. (I often photographed naked models in our yard and Brian thought it important to give the neighbors a little privacy). What was once a dirt driveway slowly filled with Japanese maples, white pine, pendular blue spruces, and Himalayan and bristlecone pines. Each Fall Brian harvested seeds from the more mature plants in our yard and supplemented by purchasing new packets of seed in the winter. As time passed the gardens grew and supported throngs of pollinators, birds, snakes, porcupines, deer, opossum, groundhogs and other mammals. It gave new shape to our land and our pathways through it. By the end of our ninth year in Maine, our home felt anchored to a living, breathing earth–the summers, an operatic expression of color and form–that had been quietly and steadily created by my husband to both feed and comfort our small family and the ecosystem of which we are a part.
If these flowers and plants are expressions of Brian’s love for us and the earth, so is this body of my photographic work a love letter to my husband. In all the years since 2015 (and the original Wedding Flowers image) I have not stopped making these images culled from our garden and the surrounding landscape. Even though I am primarily a portrait photographer, the Dark Matter series has become an important part of my practice. I only use flowers, vegetables and berries that come from the gardens cultivated by Brian (with one exception, a pomegranate early on), and sometimes to supplement these materials I will also visit the ocean near our home to collect seaweed from the beach.
This work is an ever-evolving collaboration: an expression of my admiration for what my husband sees, nurtures and grows, but it is also a celebration of our living environment and the remarkable ecosystems that thrive in part because of his stewardship. We fall asleep at night nestled in the gardens that Brian has tended, listening to peepers sing from the pond in April, porcupines arguing over the best pears from the tops of our trees in August, and foxes calling to their kits from the woods in the Fall. Our home is encircled by Brian’s love and labor, as well as the natural beauty and animal life that co-exists alongside ours because of his gardens and care.
In this way, these images are also a way of chronicling time. It documents what blooms during different seasons and unflinchingly observes the fragility and evanescence of all life. With the climate crisis upon us, weather patterns changing and Maine waters warming, it is difficult to know what of these fragile and beautiful living things will be with us in 50 years. If part of the magic of photography is that it can help us to remember and in some ways suspend moments in time, my hope is that it will also aid us to see more clearly the gifts we enjoy and remind us of what we risk losing through indifference or inaction.
Jocelyn Lee, Maine 2023