About the work

With this series I present the complex emotions of heartbreak through grocery store produce. The images are black and white still life’s - a nod to my inspiration, photographer Edward Weston and his famous, deeply expressive “Pepper Number 30”. As a finished series, they are straightforward, classic and clean. But, after a breakup, I found the landscape of grief anything but organized. It felt overwhelming, messy and chaotic. Anger merged into fear which transformed into shame and sadness. One day at the supermarket, I saw a shallot. It looked exactly how I felt: empty, fragile, exposed. An heirloom tomato looked strong and abundant. An endive unfolded a new leaf. Suddenly my emotions weren’t so invisible; they were expressed precisely in a subject matter I never would have expected. Creating this series became my breakup therapy. Wandering the produce section, selecting pieces, examining them and photographing transformed my difficult emotions into something beautiful, organized, and timeless. Each piece works great as a stand alone image, a collection of two or three, or even a grid of nine.