There’s a quiet, desert town in West Texas known for its incredible starry night sky, mysterious Marfa lights, cool vibes and thriving art scene.  The desert provides a calm backdrop to pops of color. Inspiration is all around. About 30 miles northwest of town stands Prada Marfa, one of those pops of color that just makes you smile for its clever ridiculousness.  A pretend showroom of fancy shoes and clothes out in the middle of nowhere.  Well worth the 30 minute drive to witness the sheer genius of it.  

I took this photo as dark clouds were rolling in and tumbleweed bumped and jumped across the desert.  Next to Prada Marfa stands this fence draped with locks.   Locks of all sizes and colors, locks with initials of couples, of families and friends just passing by and securing their symbolic pledge to each other.  Hundreds of them forever on a fence, in the middle of the desert.  Beautiful and fantastically absurd.  A fence, usually something that divides us is now an anchor of connection,  symbolically holding love and peoples’ attachment to each other.   How can we show our love to each other and to strangers? We can all be an anchor of loving people and things we care about, things we want to take care of and protect.  

For this series, I used desert colors of cinnamon and golden mustard as well as a little slate blue for the moody dark clouds and a bit of light pink for the sun beams breaking through the clouds.  I experimented with several photolithography techniques to apply the photo. There were many blurry attempts, and finally, this approach proved I could get some fairly clear resolution of the fence and locks onto the clay.  I really enjoy the photolithography process and suspect there will be many more photos to come.