Forget Me Not I have been experimenting with eco-processing, using less toxic ways to develop my black and white 16mm footage for a few years now. I started to grow a developers garden, planting flowers and herbs that I could harvest and use to create plant-based developers. I have also used various weeds and foraged plants around my neighborhood and found outside of town. For another project I was experimenting with using extension tubes to magnify and see deep into things, beyond that which my eyes could resolve. As I was testing this in my developer’s garden I started to see deep into the flowers, often using a hand held camera, so the image would pass in and out of focus. Somehow the extreme close ups, passing in and out of focus reminded me of drawing, the way you look so much more closely at a thing when you are trying to follow its contours with pencil on paper. Then I was thinking about the camera-stylo concept, using the camera like pen, or instead a penci, and maybe not writing essayistic “words” with a camera but instead the camera and filmstock as pencil and paper, seeing things you otherwise don’t see, by closely observing. How meditative and calming. Beyond goal oriented, just looking, time slows, you hear things and see things differently. I think of these flower films as ongoing, a’cycle’ of films. the umbrella title is “forget me not”

Sunflowers

Short film, 8m12s 2025

16mm color and black and white, with hand painted animation.

The black and white film negative used in this film is hand processed using nontoxic plant-based developers and caffenol, which is made from instant coffee. Plants used as developers were primarily oregano and calendula, an unknown weed gathered by the train tracks, and mint.

I grew sunflowers in my garden for a few years and watched the birds get excited by them. I noticed that to gaze into their centers is like gazing into eternity. Now they grow on their own, reseeding themselves. They are a back-alley favorite and a sublime design marvel, simultaneously shaped and touched by human hands while holding the mysteries of the universe within their fractal shapes.

Black Hollyhock

Short film, in progress

16 mm negative, color and black and white

The black and white film negative used in this film is hand processed using  non toxic plant-based developers or caffenol, made from instant coffee. Plants used as developers were primarily oregano, dandelions, and  arrowleaf balsamroot. I saw these seeds in a packet that said “black hollyhock.” Who ever heard of a black flower? I had to try. In different light they look deep purple, and then again , black. Using extentions tubes to get a better look, I can see the styles and stamens at different stages, which is how this plant avoids self pollination. Bees and other pollinators land and bury themselves in the little hut made by the petals. They become drunk and covered with the powdery pollen. In Montana this is a late summer flower, so its hot, and sometimes smoky as fire season sets in. The black hollyhocks are getting cross pollinated with other people’s hollyhocks and some go toward violet now. I have to protect the ones I want to stay black. Now they reseed themselves.

The film is wordless. with minimal sounds, meditating on the intricate details found in the petals, the blooms, the seed pouches and the seeds themselves, that end the cycle of blooming.

Zinnias

Short film, 9m15s, in progress

16mm color and black and white, with hand painted cyanotype animation.

One stanza of this film is created using cyanotype animation, a technique of transferring an image sequence to negative, exposing to cyantype coated paper in the sunlight, to create a positive cyantoype (prussian) blue image which is then rescanned back into a image sequence and animated. This can be further manipulated in paper form to create different colors and textures. I am very interested in playing with the line between photographic reality and an expressive reality, images that represent the way a place, person or flower makes us feel rather than know. Both inform us as sensory beings.

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Mojave Dreams 

experimental documentary, work-in-progress

I have been reading about the dire predictions of the future of Joshua Trees in the Mojave desert since the Dome fire in 2020, a lightning caused fire that burned over one million mature Joshua Trees in a matter of days. The Mojave National Preserve in southern California has been a place I have visited for a decade, and so this news was alarming, to say the least. I have been collecting footage of this iconic tree since I first visited in 2015, and as the fires keep coming and the predictions get worse, I hope to create an ode to what may end up being the passing of the time of the Joshua Tree. The goal of the film is to create a record of these forests as they existed pre fire and compare it visually to my post fire filming and recordings. While the film may serve as a document of these changes, my hope is that it also works to honor this landscape, a fragile ecosystem that lies on the front edge  of rapid environmental change that effects all earthbound creatures