Homegrown Stories is an online collaborative media project. Initiated June 2013, the original project was informed by over three decades of media work by the two collaborating artists LeAnn Erickson and Sandy Dyas.  Each of the artists has a deep commitment to the aesthetics of still photography as it applies to the moving image as well as an intellectual interest in questions of personal space, the act of storytelling and the primacy of place in shaping one’s world view.

Embracing a one-shot aesthetic, the project was designed as a ‘conversation’ between collaborators, with each new posting inspired by the previous post. Using ‘pocket’ technology, such as smart phones and point-and-shoot cameras, the project sought to capitalize on the serendipitous results of spontaneous interaction with one’s environment.

In 2015 Dyas and Erickson expanded the project to include invited artists. Using a prompt, collaborators explored the parameters and boundaries of a chosen concept.

During 2017-2018 Dyas and Erickson launched Elemental, an iteration meant to push the collaborative aspect of the Homegrown Stories project. International sound artists were invited to create original sound work based on an Elemental prompt while Dyas and Erickson created separate video pieces. The serendipitous results can be experienced through the combined video/sound pieces. http://homegrownstories.com

In 2021, Homegrown became the Year of the Poet. Poet Melissa Ginsburg lent collaborators three poems that became prompts for videos that pushed the conventions of documentary and experimental techniques.

Homegrown Stories 2022 theme is “Year of Serving Leftovers”. For the “Leftovers prompt”, Homegrown was asking video and sound artists to use creative leftovers as material for this year’s work. They had approached a number of sound artists asking for them to either create a 1-3 minute sound piece from leftovers bits or submit a finished piece they never put out into the world. The video artists will then use the sound piece as the soundtrack for a video, created from their own leftover footage.

I was initally invited to be a participating artist during the 2021 iteration of Homegrown Stories, and more recently again in 2022. The following videos are my responses to prompts that were presented to the artists over 2021 and 2022.