In my project “Far From” I want to make visible what landscape photography can look like for a female photographer with child rearing responsibilities.  I combine landscape photographs of the American West with embroidery to challenge the masculinity of traditional landscape photography and the myth of the West. Landscape photography was traditionally dominated by male photographers as it was deemed unsafe and impractical for women who were constrained to the domestic sphere, close to their housekeeping and child rearing duties. The myths of the American West, its rugged, open, wild landscape have also been closely associated with macho masculinity, the idea of the independent, tough man, ready to draw on his weapon, to conquer and defend the land. Landscape photography also contributed to the history of conquest of the West with its role in surveying and controlling.

Embroidery, on the other hand, has been traditionally labelled as women’s work. It has been seen as something that women can do within the safety of the home, producing artifacts to decorate its interior, keeping them out of harm’s way and out of trouble, compatible with their domestic duties and especially child rearing as it can be put aside and resumed at will. Landscape photography was deemed too far, too dangerous, too incompatible with being a woman.

Things have changed and landscape photography is open to female photographers now. Or is it? I made the black and white landscape photographs used in this project at the fringes of family trips. I embroidered them in the safety of my home, between school drops offs and pickups, kids’ illnesses, and school holidays, often with children in the same room, the work repeatedly interrupted and resumed. I am drawing on the history of embroidery as both a symbol of female submission and a weapon of resistance for women, and overlaying that to the masculinity of landscape photography and the American West. Stitching usually has to do with mending or embellishing; my marks are the feminine overlaying the masculine, they are imposing on it, cracking it open, splitting it apart, growing into it.