circling: margaret lampert
Creating a record of loss is a highly personal pursuit, one that Margaret Lampert chose to follow from behind her camera during a nine-month Photography Atelier workshop at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston. The project-based workshop was taught by photographer Jennifer McClure, and culminates in a group exhibition in May. Lampert had always been interested in the workshop because of its in-depth, long-term commitment. “The Atelier workshops encourage experimentation in terms of both subject matter and approach,” she shares. “Even the word ‘atelier’ is inspiring to me—by definition atelier means creating a space or room where artists make their work.”
Lampert was in the midst of shooting a personal project about the recent loss of her mother when the workshop began. “I had been shooting around this theme in a less studied way, and the workshop focused me,” she says. “The work is about loss, but in it I am also trying to convey the emotional significance of our childhood landscapes. The workshop assignments were about seeing what we’re drawn to, and it became apparent that, for me, what I am most drawn to is this particular landscape surrounding my childhood home.”
A circle is a symbol of wholeness, and Lampert uses this symbol as a conceptual frame for the series—which includes foggy, forested New England farmland shots, photos of her late mother’s objects and artifacts, close-up captures of frosty grasses and pond-grown reeds, and self-portraits. In the latter, Lampert’s body is mediated by light; in these photos she is shown sitting in a sunbeam or behind glass. Light is, Lampert shares, probably the biggest protagonist in these images: “Light is transformation,” she says. “Like life, it is ephemeral, fleeting, beautiful.”
Lampert named the series Circling, but her artist statement reveals that, rather than her choosing the shape, it chose her. “A loop encircles the farm where I grew up,” she writes. “I know it so well. I can close my eyes and picture the twists and turns of the road, the light sifting through the trees, the reflections in the river. When I can’t sleep, I imagine leaving home and setting out to walk the loop.”
The recurrence of the circle is not only conceptual. Curving gestures also show up in the images: the arching stems in a bramble of Queen Anne’s lace; rounded mirrors harnessing refracted light; a gilded picture frame; a woman’s arms encircling a houseplant. This one with the title, Wrapping My Arms Around You. Together, the photographs and Lampert’s writing about them articulate a sense of yearning—a reaching out that contains the past, present, and future—and an acknowledgement that when we yearn, the land and light reach back to us.
