Artist Statement

Danielle discovered photography in the late 1970’s while dumping water in and out of buckets so her father could learn to play with shutter speeds on his new Canon AE-1. But it was the darkroom in middle school that triggered her love for making photographs. She found peace there as an adolescent, and that continued throughout her high school and college years where she focused on documentary photography and portraiture. Eventually Danielle combined her love for the visual arts with her love of teaching and spent nearly a quarter of a century teaching students how creating art can change their perspectives on the world, and change their lives.

As a 7-12th grade visual arts teacher, mother to a teenager, and city dweller, Danielle finds herself seeking quiet, calm, balance, and order wherever she can. With her current photography practice she attempts to create compositional “perfection” in the spaces she sees throughout the day. However, in 2022 Danielle found herself altering these simple photographs to create new surreal landscapes in the “Another Place” series. She creates places that combine landscapes and cityscapes into layered, abstract spaces that evoke alternate realities. Each image is a reaction to the place (emotional and physical) she was in while creating the piece, and include themes of connection, disconnection, inner calm, loss, discomfort, beauty in the unknown, and hope.