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Sleep Creek (1st printing)
P. Guilmoth & Dylan Hausthor
£95.00
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Flowers Drink The River
Pia-Paulina Guilmoth
£150.00
Sleep Creek (1st printing)
Sleep Creek (1st printing)
Sleep Creek (1st printing)
Sleep Creek (1st printing)
P. Guilmoth & Dylan Hausthor

Sleep Creek (1st printing)

£95.00 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 124): Computation results in '-Infinity'%
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Shipping calculated at checkout.
  • VOID 2019
  • Softcover, 1st edition
  • Used: near fine

‘Sleep Creek’ is a landscape filled with trauma and beauty. It’s a place where animals are only seen when they’re being hunted and humans balance between an unapologetic existence and an abyss of secrecy. These images manipulate a landscape that is simultaneously autobiographical, documentary, and fictional: a weaving of myth and symbol in order to be confronted with the experiential. Following the rituals of those within it, ‘Sleep Creek’ is an obsession between the subject and the photographer — a compulsion to reveal its shrouded Nature.”

Dylan and Paul have been working together since 2011 but they only started making ‘Sleep Creek’ in 2016, when they lived together in a cold house on Peaks Island, a small island only accessible by boat off of the coast of Maine. They gave themselves the boundary of the island as a perimeter to make photographs. It began as a traditional interest in place—a documentary of a piece of land and stories of its inhabitants, but as the work began to expand they let their thoughts cross-pollinate with those outside the island, namely their families and the lands that we were raised on. 
“There’s something deeply personal about many of these images, but we hope that there is something more universal in the intensity of the characters and their interactions with the land.”
— Paul Guilmoth & Dylan Hausthor

A fine copy of the 1st edition with light shelfwear to cover only.

‘Sleep Creek’ is entirely shot in New England, for the reason that this was the only region that the artists knew. Even though the place holds a strong regional identity, Paul and Dylan didn’t want the work to represent or speak to a regional identity but to use the region as a backdrop for more unhindered ideas of story, myth, and character.

That said, they do believe there is something specifically inspiring about the simultaneous history and youth of this part of America. In their own words: “Colonialism is apparent everywhere, every square foot of woods has been tainted by something human, and every pond is always covered with algae. There is anonymity in all of their characters, akin to the faceless identity of small-town New England”.

Even though ‘Sleep Creek’ blurs the borders of reality and fiction, the intention of the artists was never to confuse, but rather to build a place from the ground up, leaving little remnants of the place they initially set out to document. Their impulse to contort “place” had to do with the inevitable ways the exterior world affects one’s interior landscape and experience of it. There are no beginnings, middles, or ends in their experiences of the world, nor a hard line between the experienced and the directed.

Recommended.  1st edition/printing.

Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Flowers Drink The River
Pia-Paulina Guilmoth

Flowers Drink The River

£150.00 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 124): Computation results in '-Infinity'%
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Shipping calculated at checkout.
  • Stanley Barker 2024
  • Hardback, 1st edition, 80p
  • New

Pia-Paulina Guilmoth’s Flowers Drink the River reveals a dreamscape where mud, earth and stone envelop, and the forest floors are wet with glowing dew. Using a large format camera and careful analogue techniques, Pia finds an entrancing, mystical presence in her daily experiences amidst the forests, fields, and rivers of her home. Pia’s hazy images, filled with light aberrations and glowing spectres, leave us suspended mid-ritual. 

Flowers Drink the River spans the first two years of Pia’s gender transition, as she photographs her small community in rural Maine, and the beauty and terror of living as a trans woman in a small right-wing town. Scenes of moths and floating spider silk, mud-drenched bodies intertwining, a burning house, girlfriends pissing on each other from tree branches, nocturnal animals, and euphoric rituals adorn flash-soaked landscapes. Under the moon, the boundaries between people, animals, and the land soften and blur. Flowers Drink the River is an animistic search for beauty, resistance, safety, and magic in a world often devoid of these things. It’s a love note to rural working-class people, trans women, lesbians, queer people and the backwoods of central Maine. Pia finds beauty and belonging as she creates a utopia hidden just barely out of reach. 

Pia’s photographs begin with patient acts of co-creation. She stages delicate sculptures out of spider silk, flowers, and other natural materials, then she waits as the land and water, wind, light, or a stray moth, begin to interact with them in unpredictable ways. Sometimes the creation takes the form of building trust with animals, carefully, over many nights.

“each night for a week in august i would sit in the tall, tick-infested grass behind the orchard covered in Scent Killer Gold, wearing a ghillie suit, holding a tray full of crushed apples in one hand, and a 30 foot makeshift shutter release cable attached to my 4×5 camera in the other hand. the same family of deer would get more comfortable with my presence each night. eventually they were eating the ripe fruit from my hands. the following tuesday i would have my first hrt consultation. i was keeping it a secret, knowing there was no way i could safely transition in this place, but also no way i could hide my changing body over the following months and years.” - Pia-Paulina Guilmoth

Presented as large format 3/4 Swiss bound volume, Flowers Drink the River's cover is replete with reproductions of an aged pink craft paper that Pia found stashed in an abandoned house down the road from her home. She then covered a spider web found along the river in a powdered red pigment and adhered it to the paper. Over this a cloth nameplate has been added, while the inside cover features a tipped on facsimile 4x5" contact print that she made in her bathroom.