Blowing in the Wind

This series is about secrets. It is about the impossibility to know what transpires behind closed doors: behind the clapboard facades, the white picket fences or the fluttering pristine linen strung out on the line.

The images, depicting houses in rural America, half hidden by sheets languidly blowing in the wind, present us with a relatively familiar and banal domestic scene. The blank, closed facades of the houses, just perceptible behind the curtain of fluctuating sheets, do not reveal much about what transpires within. This layering of barriers creates a remoteness, and a sense of claustrophobia in the images. The sheets may obscure our view, keeping strangers out, but they also imprison whomever maybe at home.

The overall treatment of the image, specifically, its washed-out quality, places all the elements - houses, landscapes and sheets - on the same plane. We are thus confronted with an image which seems impenetrable. The white colour shrouds the image, hiding, like the sheets, the intimate, private and, ultimately, unknowable lives that inhabit these dwellings. Whiter than white – it is this pristine façade that we present to the world.

There is no voyeurism here, no storytelling documentation, only a sense of isolation. In the end, this series alludes to, without elucidating, the mysteries of our lives behind closed doors when we are at home, alone in our domestic environment.