“…it feels like prayer… I’m praying to the only creator that I’ve ever actually physically known…” — Jason Reynolds describing caring for his dying mother

In 2023 my mother died. I feel her loss profoundly—not only within me, but in the landscape around her home in Australia. Following her death I found myself searching for traces of her everywhere— how could someone so alive simply cease to exist?

Near my parent’s home, a creek runs through the bushland. My son, nieces, and nephew were drawn to it —a place of shifting currents, hidden corners, and daily transformation. In the imagined places of childhood trees turned magenta, watery shallows became magical kingdoms, and mud and silt transformed into emerald worlds alive with possibility. They seemed to find traces of her which I had not. The kids seemed to understand that she had not vanished but become scattered through the landscape.

Shortly before my mother died, she told me she was waiting for a bird. She didn’t know what kind, only that it would carry her safely away. I never learned whether my mother’s bird came for her. I like to imagine that it did— and that she hovers above the creek still, watching as we dive into the water below.

This body of work began as a way of searching for my mother through photography—to locate a sense of her presence despite her physical absence. Scattered among images of my mother taken before her death are landscapes from Australia, hand-printed and hand-manipulated in the colour darkroom. Other abstract images are close-ups of failed negatives, their residue resembling aerial views of the watery spaces surrounding my parents’ home.

By weaving together photographs made before her death with images of my family in its aftermath, and placing them in dialogue with what we might consider the ultimate mother—Mother Earth—the work becomes a tribute to my mum: a small prayer to her, and to the traces of her forever carried through my memory and my home.