sarah hinds

song of a mourning dove has become a study of cold – a confrontation of what I find comforting, the nostalgia I feel for a past and time I cannot return to. The death and austerity associated with a cold snap before the regrowth of spring is a phenomenon I have learned to find macabrely beautiful. My childhood home, as an emotional and physical landscape, was one of coldness. Winter was the longest season, and emotions were secondary, a hindrance to productivity and usefulness, true to the self-sacrificial lessons of Catholicism and the rigidity of the military. Pinhole photography is a major element of this work. I use a camera I built myself, 5x7 silver gelatin paper to capture paper negative images, which I process, scan, and invert to print. Pinhole photography, having a lensless aperture, produces distorted, unfocused, but infinite-feeling images, an effect that feels dreamlike and dissociative. This technique replicates feelings I associate with my  memories of  upbringing in religion, evoking an overall sense of foreboding, and the eye of an indirect observer. Pinhole images are in conversation with traditional darkroom practice. The observational, notated, documentarian traits of the contact sheets and darkroom prints are disrupted, at times, by scouring into the emulsion. This work explores the sensation of cold and the how definition of comfort is individual, shaped by trauma.