Transition
by Esther Mathieu
In the course of a week, a day, an hour in Montana’s Centennial Valley, the sky and air and landscape change so many times it is impossible to chart the soft gradations. Life becomes a series of in-between spaces. Being in this place, spending time immersed in the ecosystems and the close company of the birds and insects, observing moose from safe distances, becomes a different experience of time. Time slows, molasses, and then slips suddenly like river water past. You spin a little in your canoe, you trail a hand through the algae, you acquaint yourself with all the soft places, accept the idiosyncrasies of time, between these mountains.
I took these photographs in the course of my artist residency at the Taft-Nicholson Center in summer 2023, a time in which I was thinking very much about wetlands, and about the transitions between forms. In part this interest in transition was rooted in my body: a transition time in which I was beginning to better understand the impact of my own disabilities on the space I inhabit and the interactions I embody. The work I was doing became concerned with softness, softness directed towards myself and my aching body, and the softness of even brutal forces in the world I found myself in: shed feathers of a broken bird, stormclouds always carrying the risk of fire. As I rode my bike over gravel hills, moved between the different lakes, passing between ranks of cows whose enormity I greeted with nervous song, I felt things—sky, water, space—slipping around me, knew myself only in relation to this liminal space.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Esther Mathieu is a writer and visual artist from Queens, New York, currently living in Salt Lake City, where they are pursuing a Masters in Environmental Humanities. Their work is most interested in queerness, disability, ecologies, mythologies, and sense of place. In all her work, which is situated primarily in the fields of poetry, photography, book arts, collage, and illustration, Esther is interested in exploring liminal spaces and engaging with the uncanny.
Website: ehlmathieu.com. @ehlmathieu on Instagram.