It was six months into covid lockdown and I hadn’t left my cabin nearly the entire time. I have a highly compromised immune system and this was well before there was a vaccine. I live in a very rural and republican part of Tennessee, and at one point, Tennessee had the highest Covid infection rate per capita and my county at the time was the highest infection rate in the state. The propaganda, conspiracy theories, and ineptitude of the Trump administration meant that half of the folks in my town didn’t believe Covid even existed and the other half thought that wearing a mask was an infringement on their freedom.

I was wildly prolific making work at the time, but I wasn’t willing to make unnecessary trips to town for sculpture supplies. Then I found this box of neon colored bendable straws in cabinet. I used to make straw sculptures similar to this as a young child, and my muscle memory took over. They looked like neon versions of the ones that I made when I was 6.

These are a great example of lighting and filters to create in camera magic. I used a shallow depth of field and a low camera angle to force a sense of scale so that the small-ish sculptures would appear huge. I hung them from a tree using fishing line(you can faintly see if you zoom in), misted them with glycerin to create dew drops to catch the light, and stacked two filters on the lens (a star filter and a glimmerglass soft focus) that created the hazy glow.