Flowers Drink the River by Pia-Paulina Guilmoth reveals a dreamlike landscape where mud, earth and stone envelop one another and forest floors are wet with glistening dew. Using a large-format camera and careful analogue techniques, Pia finds a mystical, mesmerising presence in her daily experiences among the woods, fields and rivers of her home. Her hazy images, filled with light aberrations and glowing spectres, leave us suspended in the midst of ritual.
Flowers Drink the River spans the first two years of Pia's gender transition, as she photographs her small community in rural Maine and the beauty and terror of living as a trans woman in a small right-wing town. Scenes of moths and floating spider silk, intertwined mud-soaked bodies, a burning house, girlfriends urinating on one another from tree branches, nocturnal animals and euphoric rituals adorn landscapes saturated with flashes of light. Beneath the moon, boundaries between people, animals and land soften and blur. Flowers Drink the River is an animist search for beauty, resistance, safety and magic in a world often lacking these things. It is a love note to rural working-class people, trans women, lesbians, queer people and the woods of central Maine. Pia finds beauty and belonging while creating a utopia hidden just beyond reach.
Pia's photographs begin with patient acts of co-creation. She presents delicate sculptures made from spider silk, flowers and other natural materials, then waits for earth and water, wind, light or a stray moth to begin interacting with them in unpredictable ways. Sometimes creation takes the form of carefully building trust with animals over many nights.
"Every night for a week in August, I sat in the tall, tick-infested grass behind the orchard, covered in Scent Killer Gold and dressed in a ghillie suit, holding a tray of crushed apples in one hand and a makeshift 30-foot shutter-release cable connected to my 4×5 camera in the other. The same family of deer grew more comfortable with my presence each night. Eventually they were eating the ripe fruit from my hands. The following Tuesday I would have my first HRT consultation. I kept it secret, knowing there was no way I could transition safely in this place, but also no way I could conceal my changing body over the coming months and years." — Pia-Paulina Guilmoth
Presented in a large-format volume with 3/4 Swiss binding, the cover of Flowers Drink the River is filled with reproductions of an aged pink craft paper Pia found hidden in an abandoned house near her home. She then coated a spiderweb found along the river with powdered red pigment and attached it to the paper. A cloth title label was added over this, while the inside cover features a tipped-in facsimile 4x5" contact print she made in her bathroom.
