Allison Barnes

Blending autobiography and an extended narrative on landscape, time, and place, my work offers an inter-textual examination of geography and personal experience. Photographing with an 8×10 view camera, I explore themes of history as provoked by an object or place. My practice is peripatetic, using photography as a means of getting somewhere and to simultaneously be; it is a form of activity that mediates my experience of place as I conjure up moments of seeing and recollection.

Neither For Me Honey Nor the Honey Bee invites one to consider the significance of particular ways we perceive our histories. The landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is made out of memory and desire, of shifting gestures that point towards what has happened and will happen. There are places that make us, and in some way, we make them. Our means of survival speak of how we value and use the natural world according to our senses, and shows how our own history becomes aligned with the history of a site. The terrain of these stories are built out of personal geographies where we seek comfort and sometimes solitude, where the light is regenerated into three hundred golden bees, calling forth desires that are reconcilable.

View more of Allison’s work online at www.allisonbarnes.net or on Instagram.