Lucy Gaines

A Storyteller’s Remove

For this film, I returned to my hometown, where the landscape makes its collision between environmental and human rights issues visual. In Jackson, Mississippi, untold histories emerge from the grounds in which they were buried alive, cracking the facade of a capitol city. It was here that Eudora Welty grasped her profound “sense of place,” and here that my own grew unfamiliar. Titled by the moment that Eudora Welty first felt “a storyteller’s remove,” the documentary adopts Welty’s ways of seeing from her garden to her grave.

Alternative Gardens

As the southern landscape changes before our eyes, my photographic practice helps me begin to see these spaces differently. Through a documentarian lens, I find cautious beauty in human-nature entanglements, wary of the systems that generated them.

Lucy Gaines is a writer and documentarian in pursuit of an M.A. in Southern Studies and Documentary Expression at The University of Mississippi. Previously, she earned her B.F.A in Art and B.A. in English Literature from Rhodes College before working across creative disciplines to hone her multimedia storytelling approach. Her current research and creative projects seek to challenge and mobilize the definitive “sense of place” once attributed to the American South.