“Around the time we began working with Trailborn I was in the midst of listening to Dolly Parton’s America. My favorite episode of the podcast was when the host Jad Abumrad visits Dolly’s childhood home deep within the Smokey Mountains. Listening to Jad’s narration was on par with the experience of reading One Hundred Years of Solitude; I could see the fog, feel the dampness, and hear the crunch underfoot on the forest floor. Soon, I found myself sitting shotgun as Chris drove us up the Blue Ridge Parkway in near darkness. The next morning, everything was covered in a thick fog that slowly cleared to showcase the same images my mind had conjured up weeks before. It was GREEN. It was also BLUE, BROWN, PINK, and YELLOW. Saturated, heavy and high. It was not far from here that Josef and Anni Albers taught students like Ruth Asawa, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jacob Lawrence. Up in these mountains – during the Great Depression – they expounded upon the importance of experimentation and craft, trained students in the fundamentals of line and color, and bore American Modernism. Albers and his students created matière studies out of discarded materials like leaves and wire, improvising and studying to create work that was human, but not precious. So I went to North Carolina by way of the Hudson Valley, having listened to a podcast about Dolly Parton, with a BFA that required me to read Interaction of Color and Bauhaus Manifesto 1919 almost twenty years ago. And while that might seem like a scattered relationship to have with the Smokey Mountains, when I look at the final product it makes perfect sense how we got here.” RH

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTIAN HARDER