This work is a continuation of Blood Ties 2005, a body of work in which I photographed myself, my first baby daughter, Lola, and my mother. With the pregnancy and birth of my second daughter, Lucia, in 2006, I expanded my photographs of myself and my older daughter to include her, and their father, as well.

With a changing familial structure, I began to focus on the world of my children -- their relationship to each other, and to nature. Engaging my own sense of wonder and fear of my children both having more dependence on each other and less on me, I use the natural world as a psychological metaphor, a counterbalance between the utopian and the cataclysmic. While I was interested in loosely reinterpreting Madonna and Child themes in my earlier work, in this body of images I am more interested in Garden of Eden allusions. Photographing primarily in the natural world, or on occasion in architectural interiors where the focus is toward the outdoors, I am interested in the biblical metaphor of the Garden of Eden, where nature is both haven and site of potential upheaval.

As in my earlier work I am interested in the maternal lineage of my family, but have expanded its scope to include my daughters' father, and his childhood Floridian home which we frequent. In so doing, I am opening up the content of my photographs to a richer, more complicated environment -- one that is more mysterious and vast and cryptic. In a sense I am exploring my loss of control as my family expands and my older daughter, no longer a baby, grows out of her complete dependence on me. Perhaps I am revisiting my own childhood, and compounding it with my responsibility as parent.

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