A Place for Everything

I’ve written before about the different ways I use photography in my practice. Sometimes a photograph is a finished work in itself. Other times, photography is a way of observing, collecting, and returning to something I want to understand more closely.

The business side of my practice currently focuses largely on preparing finished work for my website and for local markets and fairs. This has worked well for the paintings, drawings, cyanotypes, cards, and smaller photographic prints that I can produce and finish in my own studio.

But there is another body of work that has been somewhat underserved by that approach.

For many years—really, since the early days of digital cameras—I have been drawn to photographing patterns, rhythms, moods, and repetitions in the natural world. I notice the movement of water, the arrangement of grasses, patterns in stone, reflections, shifting light, and forms that become almost graphic or abstract when viewed closely or removed from their larger surroundings.

These photographs are connected by a way of looking more beyond the specific subject. And increasingly, I’ve realized that many of them benefit from a scale that I simply can’t produce in my studio.

After committing to making photography a more intentional part of Monica Adams Art & Such, I began looking for a way to give this work a place of its own.

For now, I’ve created a Large-Format Photography gallery on my website, including a curated collection called Between Rhythm and Stillness. From there, visitors can explore an external gallery where selected photographs can be produced at a larger scale than I am able to offer myself. Smaller, studio-produced, signed photographic prints will continue to be anchor and available through my own shop when appropriate.

It is an experiment, and I expect the collection to grow slowly as I continue exploring my photography collection.

My hope is that this creates a place for a different part of my practice—and a way to share photographs that invite a different kind of looking. At a larger scale, patterns can unfold, repetitions become more apparent, and details that might otherwise be overlooked have room to be observed and studied.

Perhaps that is what I have been looking for all along: not a way to make every piece of work fit into the same format, but a place where each kind of work can become what it needs to be.