I stood before this tangle of driftwood for a long time before raising the camera. The branches lay across one another in every direction, weathered smooth by salt and time, stripped of bark and leaf, reduced to bone-grey wood. There was no single point of entry for the eye. No clear beginning. No obvious end. The image resists order. Each limb crosses another, leans on another, holds another in place. What looks like chaos is actually a structure of mutual support. Nothing here stands alone. Everything has been shaped by what it rests against.
I am drawn to entanglement as a form of knowledge. In my scholarly life, I have come to understand that ideas rarely arrive in isolation. They accumulate, overlap, press against one another until something holds. The frameworks I work with, the people I learn alongside, the texts I return to again and again, are like these branches. Weathered. Stripped down. Interlocking in ways that only become visible over time.
Driftwood carries the memory of water. These branches were pulled from somewhere else, tumbled and smoothed, deposited here by tides or storms I did not witness. The wood remembers the journey even if I cannot trace it. Each crack and curve is evidence of force, of movement, of release.
In black and white, the texture becomes the subject. The grain of the wood, the places where bark has peeled away, the knots where branches once emerged. The tonal range holds shadow and light in close relation, revealing depth within the pile, spaces where darkness gathers beneath the visible surface.
This photograph asks me to sit with complexity rather than resolve it. It offers no single story, no clear protagonist, no tidy frame. It simply presents what remains when water and time have done their work, and invites me to notice how things hold together when nothing is holding them up. Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
