Artfields 2022

Artfields is a regional art competition held in Lake City, SC every year. Artists from around the southeastern United States submit artwork and just under 400 are selected to be displayed around town during the 10 day event. 2022 was the 5th year I submitted and the 3rd year I have been featured.

My piece is titled Guardians of the Shore and it’s a photograph on aluminum of the Milky Way rising above the Oregon Inlet Lifesaving Station. It’s a single composition not a “Photoshopped” composite image, it’s what I saw on this night last September walking among the dunes of Pea Island.

In the mid to late 1800s and early 1900s stations like this dotted the Outer Banks of North Carolina, an area also know as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. During those years before radio and radar and GPS ships sailing close to the coast would ground on the shifting sandbars and be driven ashore by stormed. sailors and passengers would find themselves in peril and in need of rescue.

The brave individuals who lived and worked in this very station and those like it would scan the seas and skies for signs of trouble and then place themselves in harms way to save people they didn’t know.

I try very hard with my photography to capture images that allow the viewer to be transported where I am and see things in the night sky that they wouldn’t ordinarily see. In the case of this image I want the viewer to imagine themselves back in time on this dark beach, looking up at the Milky Way and the clouds slowly building and wondering if a storm was on the way, wondering if their night had only begun.