Lula Hawkins

In my work, I explore the fraught relationship between photography and time. The obsessive nature of photography, of creating keepsakes, facsimiles of memory, is an attempt to transcend impermanence. I relate this to my practice, in that I spent my adolescence obsessively capturing those around me and now treasure the images as if they are little portals to the past—a desperate yet human attempt to achieve time travel through the flat object known as the photograph. This line of thinking has influenced my research on the psychology of temporal perception, specifically the ways we experience aberrations within it as a response to trauma and loss. I examine works of fiction and memoir that serve as phenomenological studies of obsession with the past and consider psychological evidence of temporal malleability. I spend time exploring the Hudson Valley and upstate New York, engaging in both inward and outward searching and allowing images to be created in the periphery. I make observational and landscape images in color, searching for moments of rupture, a layer of hyperreality atop the mundane. I capture moments such as a standoff with an animal on a deserted road or an encounter with blinding sunlight beaming through the forest. The work is based in poetic narratives found throughout the landscape and incorporates cues such as liminal settings, the twilight hour, and the subtleties of the changing seasons, illustrating disruptions in the temporal plane.