K L E A M c K E N N A | Early Color Work | 2012 - 2015
These large analog, chromogenic photograms were made in the forests of Hawaii where I spent my early childhood living “off-the-grid”. I used this remote landscape as my darkroom to expose the shadows of giant leaves and other elements onto color photographic paper, illuminating their imperfections. I see these human-sized figures as “Portraits” of the beings that inhabit this animate landscape. They speak to the personification of nature and the volatility and power it has in our lives.
“There is a sound that comes from the forest some nights. It has always been there, though it drifts in and out of human audibility. When I was a kid, my mom named it; she called it “the cocktail party in the woods”. It’s the sense that there is something happening just beyond the edge of the clearing. Beyond the dim halo of light that the house exudes, where the glow of our oil lamps and our one bare and buzzing light-bulb is swallowed by a wall of tree ferns and vines. It’s the tinkling of ice in crystal glasses and the indistinct murmur of many voices, broken by an occasional, unsettling shriek of laughter. Like so many other strange things, we accepted this long ago. And in my child-mind, I understood that my parents longed to go join the cocktail party in the woods. Or perhaps that they did, once we were sleeping.” - KM
