My practice bears witness to how film-based artworks and artifacts are transformed by their engagement with ecological degradation and colonial histories. I position Polaroid films as temporal witnesses—material archives uniquely vulnerable to environmental shifts. These images capture not only the landscapes they encounter but also the social and historical violences embedded within them. Alongside Polaroids, I work with expired and unexpired medium format, 8mm, 16mm, and digital video, as well as experimental instant film processes, to explore the interplay between time, memory, and environmental change.

The earth, like the individual, resists full comprehension. As John McPhee writes in Annals of the Former World, “the human mind may not have evolved to comprehend deep time. It may only be able to measure it.” My work does not seek to fully grasp the totality of time or the temporality of environments. Instead, it archives the visual traces of ecological and historical violence, creating a record of what environments endure and what they reveal.

The images I create are not merely representations; they are co-creations with the environment itself. Climate change, colonialism, and industrial exploitation leave their marks on these landscapes, and the resulting photographs become what I call “ghostly materials”—artifacts that bear the spectral traces of unresolved ecological, historical, and social violence. Drawing on Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters and Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, I argue that these images demand more than preservation; they demand justice. They compel us to confront the legacies of harm and imagine new ways of being in relation to the earth.

My work is deeply informed by theories of Black ecologies and geographies, which challenge dominant narratives of environmental degradation and racialized spaces. By interrogating how cultural techniques—processes and practices—sustain and reproduce ecological and structural violence, I aim to disrupt conventional understandings of environmental systems and relational ontologies. Through this critical engagement, I seek to open a third space: a site for observing the present in dialogue with the past and future, and for imagining alternative possibilities for ecological and social repair.