Kudzu Series

Kudzu may be among the least appropriate symbols of the Southern landscape and the planet's future. But its mythic rise and fall should alert us to the careless secondhand way we sometimes view the living world and how much more we might see if we just looked deeper.

Kudzu is "the ultimate icon for the South, a dramatic metaphor for almost every issue you can imagine within Southern Culture. For many, the vivid depictions of Kudzu had become the defining imagery of the landscape, only as palms might represent Florida or cactus Arizona. But for others, Kudzu was a vine with a story to tell, symbolic of strange hopelessness that had crept across the landscape, a lush and intemperate tangle the South would never escape.

Offsetting Kudzu with legendary creatures from mythology, folklore, and fairy tales is a vision that I am exploring with this new collection of photographs. There are many stories from diverse cultures that mention the appearance of animals. The Celtic people considered them to be messengers from the otherworld. In King Arthur's legends, the white stag, always pursued but never captured, represents humanity's quest for spiritual knowledge, in that case, the search for the Holy Grail. Native American lore suggests that white animals are a sign of prophecy, a message from the Great Spirit to be discussed among the tribal elders. The deer, its spreading antlers like a sunrise, represents the sun and the Great Spirit, a sense of renewal. The white deer evokes the world of imagination, spirit, and a reminder of that which is not easily seen in our everyday world.