Bayside, California | Mentor: Kristine Potter
Will Suiter is an artist working in photography, based in Humboldt County, California. He was born 1999 in the San Francisco Bay Area suburbs, and grew up sharing time between the urban SF Bay Area and rural Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. He moved to rural Humboldt County in 2017 to study forestry at Humboldt State University, and the isolated, remote geography and rural culture of the region has informed much of his work since.
Project Statement
The work I have been making during my time as a Fellow is part of a larger body and project that is still ongoing, but has developed significantly during this time, both in concept and execution. My work deals with both place-based and personal narrative, as I experience this place (Humboldt County and surrounding rural Northern California) and all of the challenges and rewards of building a life here. I’ve resolved a lot of my internal uncertainty regarding my work, but have also been left with new and exciting questions about it, which I now feel better equipped and more motivated to continue developing answers to.
Broadly speaking, my work deals with subject matter and themes pertaining to rural life, isolation, exploring where the line between solitude and loneliness lies. It is also a subjective narrative, interpreting how my memories inform my current experiences. It’s important for me to leave room for the viewer in my work to draw their own conclusions, and to lean into ambiguity, but also continually refine it into a more cohesive and complete body of work in order to reach the full potential that it has.
More specifically, the experience and learning opportunity of this Fellowship has deepened my curiosity and interest in constructing a narrative that is simultaneously fiction and nonfiction, rearranging pieces of the real world to create something that is not necessarily real or objective, but still contains truths.
As I continue to develop this body of work, I will continue to make new work and revisit my archive to strengthen and deepen this narrative, with the end goal of producing a tangible object in a printed format, as a book and/or exhibition.