Seeking Elysium is a collaboration with my two children, made during a period when our family was being remade. We cast them as Artemis and Persephone — the forever maiden braving the darkness alone, the daughter torn between her mother's realm and the underworld — and built a dreamscape across the country's state and national parks.
The myths gave us a third place to stand when the actual ground kept shifting. They gave us permission to name solitude, ferocity, and the dawn after darkness, without having to name the rest.
The images have lived mostly in private. They sat quietly while my children grew into their own lives and their own stories to tell. I am returning to the work now, and I hope they will return to it with me. Make-believe, it turned out, revealed more than I knew to look for.
