My daily life is both intensely mundane and also wondrous. There are the same clothes to wash, the same table to wipe down. Life pulses. Blood drains. Cats lounge. The sun sets with exuberant color. Mushrooms pop up. I make peace with the dichotomy of domesticity.
- Ashleigh Coleman
Children hold nothing back—living somewhat feral days as they zigzag from one curiosity to the next. Daily life, for them and with them, is intensely mundane and also overflowing with fierce wonder. Domestic dichotomies abound in the permeable membrane between adults and children and animals.
Birds flit. Cats lounge. Blood pulses.
The fragility of life hovers close to the surface.
These are deeply personal days rooted in this particular place; yet, these are also moments bearing witness to familiar joy.
As a child I remember, vividly, spending long hours riding in the car. To amuse myself, I pretended I was a detective who had to remember how to get home again-- memorizing the visual landscape, searching for small clues along the way.
Eventually I outgrew this game; however, fragments of it lingered. I look for clues through the lens of my Hasselblad. I look for the already but not yet. I look for my way home.
Ashleigh Coleman, “Hold Nothing Back”
Ashleigh Coleman (1983, Virginia) is a self-taught photographer. Her photographs have exhibited across the United States, including solo shows at the Fischer Galleries in Jackson, MS, the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture, and the Claire Elizabeth Gallery in New Orleans. Her work has also been shown at the Ogden Museum, the Griffin Museum of Photography, the University of West Virginia, the University of Southern Mississippi, the Bo Bartlett Center, and is currently part of the traveling exhibitions for Looking for Appalachia and A Yellow Rose Project. She is a founding member of Due South Co.
Ashleigh lives in rural Mississippi.
