When the High Line opened in 2009 I visited it several times and was struck by how beautiful it was. It looked like a different park every time I went. I thought about making linocut prints of the plants, wanting to capture the changing landscape of the park. Starting in January 2011, I embarked on a yearlong project of visiting the park each week and taking photographs. At my studio, I used the photographs to make linocuts – one a week for the entire year of 2011.
The experience of visiting the same place every week for a year became a meditation. I walked the same path each week, sometimes looking at, and photographing the same plants for several months before finding an image to make a print from. There are trees that I’ve developed an intimate relationship with, watching them slowly turn from fallow twigs to lush leaf and flower filled branches, and back again to fallow twigs. Looking at the same plants for a year showed me details that I wouldn’t have seen on the first or second pass – the colors of a stamen, or how mathematically perfect a leaf structure was. There were surprises – wondering what the menacing pods by the 14th Street stairway would be, and, one day seeing that they had turned into lovely pink hibiscus flowers.
The prints displayed here, in chronological order, are a record of a year spent looking at a tiny piece of land, always in flux.
