Artist’s Statement
While I was cleaning a kitchen cupboard in my apartment in San Francisco some time ago, I discovered a long-forgotten brown paper bag filled with sweet potatoes. The potatoes were shriveled and shrunken, but a tangled mass of bright purple shoots sprouted vigorously from their wrinkled bodies.
A few years after I discovered the sack of rotting potatoes, I began to photograph sprouting potatoes and onions. I purchased hundreds of pounds of potatoes and onions and allowed them to sprout in boxes in the basement. Initially, I thought of them as dying things, but I soon came to see them as quite alive. To me, they were strange little potato and onion people, shuttered away in rows of cardboard boxes, harboring distinct personalities and potentialities. And, like people, they would not sit still long in a pose. As I tinkered with the lights and adjusted the camera, they were constantly shifting, bending, swaying and reaching.
With their vibrant new sprouts emerging from shrinking forms, the potatoes and onions depict life emerging from death. They also embody, for me, the notion that matter is in ceaseless flux, endlessly degrading and reshaping.
All of the photographs were shot on Kodak Ektachrome film with a Cambo 4x5 view camera. The chromogenic prints are made on Fuji Crystal Archive glossy paper.