NEW WORK: Cartographers of Memory

I was raised on stories I didn’t believe, but wanted to. Fairy tales and family histories that changed with every retelling. Through empty roads and conversations around kitchen tables, I learned that every moment is both a discovery and a loss. The facts of our lives become history, until we have only pieces of memory woven into a personal mythology.

My grandmother, Tutu, had a stroke last February, at the age of 92. Four months later she told me that she could no longer laugh or cry, but that she still had a universe of thoughts inside her mind. For this woman of passion and chaos, a house was never enough space for all of her paper sculptures, her pianos and violins, her inventions and ideas. Now she sits in a chair in her daughter’s house, surrounded by beige walls, her mind filled with emotions and desires she struggles to express.

When I was a child her life existed for me as a series of unbelievable tales: training as a concert violinist in New York and drawing maps during WWII. Building a house in southern California out of barn doors and stained glass windows. Intentionally burning toast every morning. Befriending movie stars and opera singers and getting married four times to three husbands, but raising five daughters on her own.

At 30 I realized the stories were real. Without knowing it, I spent three years retracing many of my grandmother’s dreams – from New York City to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Adventure is her legacy.

These images, captured during my travels to San Miguel, are part family album, memoir, poem, and prayer. In the high desert, all of our masks and facades are scoured away in the wind and the dust, washed clean in the afternoon rain. The land here is made of light. It is sunbaked stone and agave plants and women emerging from their old lives like butterflies into the sharp sunlight.

This is a map of my search for my family’s history and my own home. The photographs show the expansion of a life, of becoming part of a world vaster and more fantastic than the books that fed my childhood dreams. But pause and reverse, see the images backwards, and they tell the story of a life that now turns inward, contained within four walls. And the universe of her mind. My world is now the one expanding, while Tutu’s becomes ever more still.

...You can see the full body of work on my website, maricofayre.com...

NEW WORK: Cartographers of Memory

CofM_025     CofM_026 I was raised on stories I didn’t believe, but wanted to. Fairy tales and family histories that changed with every retelling. Through empty roads and conversations around kitchen tables, I learned that every moment is both a discovery and a loss. The facts of our lives become history, until we have only pieces of memory woven into a personal mythology.

My grandmother, Tutu, had a stroke last February, at the age of 92. Four months later she told me that she could no longer laugh or cry, but that she still had a universe of thoughts inside her mind. For this woman of passion and chaos, a house was never enough space for all of her paper sculptures, her pianos and violins, her inventions and ideas. Now she sits in a chair in her daughter’s house, surrounded by beige walls, her mind filled with emotions and desires she struggles to express.

When I was a child her life existed for me as a series of unbelievable tales: training as a concert violinist in New York and drawing maps during WWII. Building a house in southern California out of barn doors and stained glass windows. Intentionally burning toast every morning. Befriending movie stars and opera singers and getting married four times to three husbands, but raising five daughters on her own.

At 30 I realized the stories were real. Without knowing it, I spent three years retracing many of my grandmother’s dreams – from New York City to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Adventure is her legacy.

These images, captured during my travels to San Miguel, are part family album, memoir, poem, and prayer. In the high desert, all of our masks and facades are scoured away in the wind and the dust, washed clean in the afternoon rain. The land here is made of light. It is sunbaked stone and agave plants and women emerging from their old lives like butterflies into the sharp sunlight.

This is a map of my search for my family’s history and my own home. The photographs show the expansion of a life, of becoming part of a world vaster and more fantastic than the books that fed my childhood dreams. But pause and reverse, see the images backwards, and they tell the story of a life that now turns inward, contained within four walls. And the universe of her mind. My world is now the one expanding, while Tutu’s becomes ever more still.

...You can see the full body of work on my website, maricofayre.com...

Unravelling

applecreek_may14_4500_sm.jpg

I began to wind up a piece of thread, loosely, thinking I was simply doing a bit of housekeeping. Too late I realized that the thread was still attached and that each new twist and turn unwound a layer behind me, revealing and releasing what was held within.

Unravelling

applecreek_may14_4500_sm.jpg

I began to wind up a piece of thread, loosely, thinking I was simply doing a bit of housekeeping. Too late I realized that the thread was still attached and that each new twist and turn unwound a layer behind me, revealing and releasing what was held within.

Reflecting

reflection_apr14_0050_sm2.jpg

For years I walked around with a camera in my hand or my purse - usually a Pentax 35mm loaded with b&w film. At one point the light meter stopped working (while I was in Paris). 28 rolls later, I became very good at making informed guesses about the light. Every now and then the film wouldn't advance and the afternoon of swimming with friends in an Oregon river, or the portrait of the girl with a pipe and red boots, would be lost to memory. Discovering the images as the prints developed - looking at the scene anew, always a little amazed when everything came together just as I imagined - that is an experience that can't be replicated or replaced. Almost 10 years ago I bought my first digital camera and began the shift that eventually saw me donating six film cameras and a car full of darkroom equipment in order to travel more, and travel light.

My purse is now more likely to hold a laptop and a phone than a camera, though there are moments like this when I still reach for the ghost of that Pentax.

Reflecting

reflection_apr14_0050_sm2.jpg

For years I walked around with a camera in my hand or my purse - usually a Pentax 35mm loaded with b&w film. At one point the light meter stopped working (while I was in Paris). 28 rolls later, I became very good at making informed guesses about the light. Every now and then the film wouldn't advance and the afternoon of swimming with friends in an Oregon river, or the portrait of the girl with a pipe and red boots, would be lost to memory. Discovering the images as the prints developed - looking at the scene anew, always a little amazed when everything came together just as I imagined - that is an experience that can't be replicated or replaced. Almost 10 years ago I bought my first digital camera and began the shift that eventually saw me donating six film cameras and a car full of darkroom equipment in order to travel more, and travel light.

My purse is now more likely to hold a laptop and a phone than a camera, though there are moments like this when I still reach for the ghost of that Pentax.

Finding Your Inner Story.

img_7265.jpg

This year is a time of personal expansion. I am saying "yes!" to new opportunities and collaborations, and I am so excited to share the journey with you! When the world feels like it is spinning too quickly, when the energy of New York builds higher and higher, when I feel like questioning every thing I make and what it all means, I return the deep places inside myself, so full of both darkness and light. Yoga and meditation prepare for insight, even revelation. Photography and writing give me the tools to record that process.

When Liza Keogh asked me to work with her to develop a retreat that incorporates all of these experiences, I felt like I won the lottery.

Retreats invite us to shed our daily habits and enter spaces that can feel very different from what we are used to experiencing on any given day. In this new space we are open to personal and professional change, enhanced creativity, awakened awareness, even deep transformation. The retreats Liza and I are developing encourage the integration of creative and mindful practices to uncover, discover and reveal your inner story, under the artful guidance of two long-time teachers.

Upcoming retreats include: Finding the Inner Story Photography, Yoga, and Meditation Retreat with Marico Fayre & Liza Keogh. August 7-10, 2014 in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico - and - October 17-19, 2014 at Nine Mountain Retreat Center in Plainfield, MA.

More information & additional retreats and workshops are coming soon!

Finding Your Inner Story.

img_7265.jpg

This year is a time of personal expansion. I am saying "yes!" to new opportunities and collaborations, and I am so excited to share the journey with you! When the world feels like it is spinning too quickly, when the energy of New York builds higher and higher, when I feel like questioning every thing I make and what it all means, I return the deep places inside myself, so full of both darkness and light. Yoga and meditation prepare for insight, even revelation. Photography and writing give me the tools to record that process.

When Liza Keogh asked me to work with her to develop a retreat that incorporates all of these experiences, I felt like I won the lottery.

Retreats invite us to shed our daily habits and enter spaces that can feel very different from what we are used to experiencing on any given day. In this new space we are open to personal and professional change, enhanced creativity, awakened awareness, even deep transformation. The retreats Liza and I are developing encourage the integration of creative and mindful practices to uncover, discover and reveal your inner story, under the artful guidance of two long-time teachers.

Upcoming retreats include: Finding the Inner Story Photography, Yoga, and Meditation Retreat with Marico Fayre & Liza Keogh. August 7-10, 2014 in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico - and - October 17-19, 2014 at Nine Mountain Retreat Center in Plainfield, MA.

More information & additional retreats and workshops are coming soon!

At Home in Motion

clouds_2077.jpg

they can call me crazy if i fail all the chance that i need is one-in-a-million and they can call me brilliant if i succeed gravity is nothing to me, moving at the speed of sound i'm just going to get my feet wet until i drown - from "Swan Song" by Ani Difranco

In familiarity there is inspiration, and also the potential for stagnation. I left home at 18 (and again at 29) to seek new types of creative expression and to find out how much bigger the world could be. Now I return to my roots for respite and the freedom that comes from working with a place and a subject that I feel in my core. Creating in Oregon is intuitive and natural. I know the light. I have traversed the landscape from stark beaches to mountain overlooks. Discovering new places to photograph feels like coming home again and again.

For years I created work about searching - for belonging, for home, for purpose. I wanted an escape and I found it in photography. My endless quest found resolution not by finding the answer but by redefining the meaning of home - instead of a physical location it became a feeling, a sense of internal peace and belonging. I think I fully realized the importance of this redefinition when I stopped dreaming about losing things.

Now the importance of place allows me to tell stories, share my world, and remember that I never travel so far that I cannot go back to the beginning.

At Home in Motion

clouds_2077.jpg

they can call me crazy if i failall the chance that i need is one-in-a-million and they can call me brilliant if i succeed gravity is nothing to me, moving at the speed of sound i'm just going to get my feet wet until i drown - from "Swan Song" by Ani Difranco

In familiarity there is inspiration, and also the potential for stagnation. I left home at 18 (and again at 29) to seek new types of creative expression and to find out how much bigger the world could be. Now I return to my roots for respite and the freedom that comes from working with a place and a subject that I feel in my core. Creating in Oregon is intuitive and natural. I know the light. I have traversed the landscape from stark beaches to mountain overlooks. Discovering new places to photograph feels like coming home again and again.

For years I created work about searching - for belonging, for home, for purpose. I wanted an escape and I found it in photography. My endless quest found resolution not by finding the answer but by redefining the meaning of home - instead of a physical location it became a feeling, a sense of internal peace and belonging. I think I fully realized the importance of this redefinition when I stopped dreaming about losing things.

Now the importance of place allows me to tell stories, share my world, and remember that I never travel so far that I cannot go back to the beginning.

Reflection of a New Moon

Walking the city at night has a magical quality. The color of light, the tiniest sliver of a yellow moon, the ring of footsteps on cobble stones, the shimmer of breath in the night air, so recently thick with the heat of a golden sun. It is the same wherever I go - from small midwestern towns, to Manhattan, to the heart of Mexico, high in the Sierra Madres. There are possibilities illuminated in the darkness that we wouldn’t dare to dream by daylight.

Time and Space

Miles feel shorter at 90mph. Or maybe time means something different here. I could stop at any point along this highway and shoot for hours. And yet there is magic in racing through the changing colors into new light, always having the camera close at hand, ready to seize images in a split second that becomes a memory.

The Beginning of a Transformation

It is just after sunrise and I sit in a hotel in Idaho, looking through the images I was too tired to be excited by last night. Each shot brings back memories of the day before, but other thoughts as well. Each reminds me of other road trips, other drives through the rough beauty of the gorge, other sunsets along other highways. Is this how the entire journey will be, a remembrance as well as a rebirth? Or, once I leave behind the diffused light of overcast skies and the states I traversed in another life, will I feel the freedom of the desert wind without the strings of past attachments? Are these memories a tether or a trap?

One thing that will not change - I am still lulled into bliss by the movement of just driving.