Refiner’s Fire explores the stark, unrelenting reality of mid-life clarity, something far more terrifying than a mid-life crisis. A crisis is chaotic, a frantic grasp for youth, reinvention, or escape. Clarity, however, is merciless. It doesn’t offer distraction or illusion; it strips everything down to the bone. It forces reckoning.

Refiner’s Fire illuminate a raw, unavoidable truth of aging, mortality, and identity. Mid-life clarity is not a crisis to survive, it is a fire to endure, one that purges falsehoods, confronts the weight of past choices, and demands acceptance of what remains.

The title comes from Malachi 3:2-3, where the refiner’s fire burns away impurities, leaving only what is pure and indestructible.

I am producing a limited series of nine salt prints for each image selected, honoring the rhythm of the novena a cycle of devotion, repetition, and prayer that carries the work into a spiritual register as well as a material one.

Each print in Refiner’s Fire is made with saltwater drawn from Penobscot Bay, so that the coast enters the work not only as subject but as substance. The paper holds the Bay’s chemical memory its sifting tides, the mineral traces, its living salt and binds them to the image through light. Into this alchemy I introduce my own blood in the final toning, mingling flesh with sea, sacrifice with salt. The work becomes both image and relic: a crucible where body, place, and spirit are refined together, echoing the mysteries of blood and water, purification and transfiguration.