Autumn Within

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

It is autumn; not without,
  But within me is the cold.
Youth and spring are all about;
  It is I that have grown old. 

Birds are darting through the air,
  Singing, building without rest;
Life is stirring everywhere,
  Save within my lonely breast. 

There is silence: the dead leaves
  Fall and rustle and are still;
Beats no flail upon the sheaves
  Comes no murmur from the mill

In the Harbor: Ultima Thule - Part II

Published 1882

Echoes, Still

Maine’s Industrial Remnants

Echoes, Still, Explores the evocative presence of Maine’s abandoned mills and factories, where brick, timber, and steel hold memory, and floors, walls, and machinery whisper endurance, labor, and human effort. Floors and walls tell of repetition and care, while shadows, light, and textures reveal the rhythms of lives once present. Through intimate, tactile photography, the artist draws on personal family histories of industrial labor, illuminating the spirit embedded in these spaces. Silence and decay are transformed into immersive encounters with memory, presence, and time suspended, where every mark, shard, and worn surface resonates with work and life. Shadows, textures, and lingering echoes shape the enduring story of Maine’s industrial past, creating spaces that feel at once empty and profoundly inhabited.

Artist Statement

By nature I’m a tactile person, guided by an inner voice that pulls me closer to places of danger, where I visualize seething motors still pressing through brick walls amid shattered glass, overgrown vegetation, and collapsing roofs, all whispering come closer. I smell the musk of rotting wood floors, and taste drooling mortar. I study the texture of each brick, and feel both the weight of a pane of Coke glass and the sharp shards of fallen windows cutting into my hands.

I photograph these buildings because they feel inhabited, carrying a presence that lives beyond architecture and history. When I stand before them, I’m responding to memory—both inherited and sensed—visualizing what remains after the machines and the people have gone quiet. This work is inseparable from my family: my Canadian French grandfather, sipping a Ballentine Ale while smoking Pall Malls at the dining room table, counting piecework pay for every shoe he made, and my Irish grandmother of County Mayo crossing the Atlantic Ocean alone as a 12 year-old child to toil her teens in the woolen mills of Boston and Worchester. Floor after floor of heavy timbers and iron, worn smooth by decades of motion, I seem to remember every machine that once shook their frame.

I move through these spaces slowly and intuitively, drawn to repetition, scale, and the physical weight of labor embedded in brick and steel. These photographs are not about nostalgia or ruin, but about endurance, presence, and spirt of the lives shaped inside walls that still hold their echoes.

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