Gofeetgo

My year through separation: June

2023: Six of Twelve

Last night I couldn’t sleep, again. I had to call Mikael @explorerglobal to get me through it. I’m prolific, but without colleagues, platform, feedback, or dialog about craft. I started writing and photographing my life 18 years ago. I’ve lived in too many places to count in that time, and have taken many journeys of personal discovery, all of which I have photographed, written about, recorded in some form or fashion. This body of work used to be available and was destroyed in one way or another. Hard drives crashed, website hacked, back ups lost, and the internet itself changing its tune too fast for a full time mother and creator to stay on board with. And so? I’ve committed fully to only new work… If there is one thing I can be the champion of it is the process of getting out of your own way and just making. In the act of it there will be a channeling of some universal question (not truth, there is none) through any given medium. I simply haven’t stopped that, but what I haven’t done is jumped on the bandwagon of making my life relatable, and what I haven’t done is manufactured a message about my life that you can take and apply to yours. It has never been my milieu, facts and guidebooks. I’m more about intuition, wisdom, and as it happens, I’m really into faith. Art shouldn’t concern itself primarily with cultivating public appeal, it simply is a messing about with tools to hone a perspective within a self-centered shifting pole of experience. The pervasive niche of self improvement has usurped all the media platforms, infiltrated all the algorithmic preferences. Why? Improvement is all that is ever desired by humans, that promise and future destination which is never touched; and that very mirage of improvement is the engine of commerce. I’m here though, with my plodding along story, always creating from that isolated outpost that artists situate in. Currently that is location Motherhood. This has been June. I’ve spent a lot of time outside, with my thoughts and have circled the drain of creative expression. It’s now time to swim.

I’ve set out to make a self-portrait each month of 2023… see the others here #hannahpc2023

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Hannah Pierce-Carlson

Born in 1981 in Texas, USA, Hannah Pierce-Carlson left for the Arizonan-Sonoran desert to study Geosciences, Geography, and Writing. In the grand scheme of things, she became an educator, ad hoc cultural geographer, and photographer. She spent a decade working and traveling in China, Korea, Taiwan, USA, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Hannah has used her camera to document cultural rabbit holes for over 15 years in a number of communities scattered across the Asian and North American continents. Her camera accompanied her on foot and as a female cyclist across East and Southeast Asia. She left Asia in 2014 and started over in her home country, this time with a family (plus dog) in the American Southwest. She is now raising her two children outside the concept of schooling. It’s called unschooling; and it’s a life experiment she’s devoted to. Hannah travels regionally and internationally with her children for many months out of the year. They home base in the hinterlands of the Northeast Kingdom, Vermont, USA.

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