Laurie says:

I’ve always admired the feminist website/ art blog Feminine Moments. It’s edited by the Danish artist Birthe Havmoeller and features fine art made by lesbian, bisexual and queer women artists worldwide. There is a monthly newsletter in addition to the website that has new work and interviews, artist’s statements and images. Her choices are always interesting and often stunning.

I subscribe to it and in a recent one she had Queer Feminist Art in Lockdown.

I immediately thought of my Pandemic Shadows project and sent her the Instagram link to the gallery. She reacted to it immediately and it is now featured on the Feminine Moments website. I also had the opportunity to see her work and it’s beautiful.

The artist’s statement below in the most recent development of my relationship to the pandemic and Pandemic Shadows. The more images I shoot, the more I am learning about light, shadows and the changes time brings. Here in San Francisco we are now in winter light and everything in shadow looks very different. I’ll be putting up some winter light images on Instagram very soon.

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This was taken in Armstrong State Park on the Russian River before the wildfires.

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I’ve been walking & living in the shadow of the pandemic and the lockdown, photographing the Pandemic Shadows that I see everywhere. I became interested in shadow patterns when I began taking iPhone photos. The pandemic, the isolation, and the walking I’ve been doing, have transformed my vision, making it far more emotionally involving and centered in my present life. It lets me make beauty in hard times.

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This photo was taken in the early winter light on Dolores in San Francisco.

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The lockdown has made me pause, observe and create images of shadows that depend on light and time and sometimes air. For me they capture an essence of this pandemic time. My work is developing very intensely, in terms of emotion, choices and differences from my previous images. The California wildfires changed the light and shadow. The people I’ve known in fire danger seem to be influencing the work as well.
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And this was taken through the rice paper in my studio window.

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One of the beautiful places shadows can go for me is into abstraction. I use it a lot in composition but my work has not been usually abstract. It’s good for my artist’s heart to go somewhere else.

In my usual day, shadows have become a major part of my perception. This is the first time I’ve seen myself in my art this way. It’s a shock to have the way I see change so powerfully. The world has changed so much and so quickly and my vision has inevitably followed.

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This final image was also taken in Armstrong State Park before the wildfires. It is the first image that I shot and kept for Pandemic Shadows.
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