My current project, Heaven is Under Our Feet, is a documentary series exploring the relationship between the Midwest landscape, Catholic iconography, rituals, and my familial relationships. The photographs in this series draw upon my Catholic upbringing and the Midwestern Landscape, two influences that have strongly impacted the way I view the world. I can’t help but feel an inherent spirituality in the land I was raised in, not because of the thousands of religious organizations that dot this space, but because of its unobtrusive landscape. The terrain demands a certain meditativeness that only something void of attention can offer you. Those quiet moments, where wild geese feed on the cut corn and the golden light touches the native grass around the river bank as you drive. The sublime is often in the places we don’t actively seek out, which is what drives me to add depth to this flat space. Heaven is not something we merely experience on religious sites, but something that is imbued in the landscape and our relationships. “Heaven,” as Henry David Thoreau writes, “is under our feet as well as over our heads.”
