As a visual artist who is also a mother, I am concerned about the landscape of the future, and the possible irony of what I create in my photographic practice could be part of a greater cycle of micro-destructions that could contribute to the ailing earth. How can I effectively re-use materials, recycle them, and reduce my chemical footprint in my artistic practice as a photographer?

The presence of our pets has always been viewed as a gift by my family. They push us out of the walled spaces of our constructed human world and back into nature. For myself, the “dog walk” becomes a meditative daily departure from a sedentary existence. As a family we have anthropomorphized their lives, creating stories out of their nightly wanderings, their disappearances and returns, their quirks, their actions and interactions with other animals and with ourselves. Their individual histories invariably become deeply embedded in a shared family experience that has a nuanced language of its own. Over the years they have each brought immense delight, companionship, comfort, healing, worry and sorrow.

Through the observation of my family’s relationship with our pets and our pets with one other, along with fragments of fauna collected on my dog walks, I am making cyanotype and anthotype images as photograms or from digital prints on paper torn out of old books while using collected rainwater, discarded cooking water and/or melted snow to stop the sun’s sensitizing process. These images will then be handbound into several small books.

&nbsp;