In Sanskrit, there is a word, lîla, “richer than our word, it means divine play, the play of creation, destruction, and re-creation, the folding and unfolding of the cosmos. Lîla, free and deep, is both the delight and enjoyment of this moment, and the play of god.” The photograph above is of the side door on my grandmother’s house in Middlesex, New Jersey. As a child, what lay on the other side of this part of my grandparent’s home was a place of deep fascination and imagination. For, just through this now defunct door, lay a small, dark hallway that separated the front of the house from the back, and that held another green door which led up to a shadowy, musty attic. As girls, my sister and I would spend hours playing within this labyrinth of possibility.
Today, as an adult woman, I find myself visiting a recurring dream that I have had since childhood. In the dream is a house, and within it are darkened hallways, secret doors, and winding staircases. I know the contours of the house as comfortably as I know my own and, after waking, the totality of my being is bathed in delicious warmth from simply having visited. Early on, I always visited the house alone and with trepidation, as there is a ghost that resides down a hidden passageway. Even though I feared it, I would simultaneously seek it out. These days, however, it seems that I am eager to introduce newcomers to not just the house but also to this entity, as I rarely enter the house alone anymore. These days, I play tour guide.
While in residency at Fort Worden, I presented a workshop in which I offered selections from my process for my peers to view, hold, and question. Someone noticed that doors, halls, and houses, play a considerable role within my photographic documentation and inquired about their significance. In her book The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, Lucy Lippard writes, “Abandoned houses are especially poignant. Their shattered, gaping, or boarded windows offer opaque apertures onto an unknown past that is not, but might be, our own. They are receptacles for shared fantasies. The natural response is to ask, “What happened here?” The answer is a story...The place is the heart of storytelling. The imaginative act of bringing together self and earth, culture and nature, as if these were remembering one another as members of one family, binding life to life.”
