predator

I dreamed it

sunlight bright

as lady hawk plucked

the wet winged hatchling

from mother-made nest.

I drank it

red hot and jaw clenching

in its timeless loop

of awful devouring

while there I too,

devoured.

I lay

as they cut the bulbous middle

(intestines set aside)

pulling soft screaming life from me

(hardening breasts by the minute)

to make a meal of me.

I bleed

a bucket tick tock, a clock

to cry myself dry

a crimson ridding

an inside, made out.

I tear

the skin flesh

of apple

of trout

and steal the calf’s milk for my cheese.

Lidia's Thrust

“Thrust”

Lidia Miles drowned the pages in a tidal wave of body, art, animal, element, futurepast, sex, friendship, and time, my my my my, my. 🌊

death

Death is the beginning, the cost, and the portal of rebirth 💀 📷 @themythopoetic

August Garden- In the Face of Fuck

I’m v into flash at night in the garden right now. I’d like to invite everyone out in the garden to see- that’s part of my nature. I like to hold microphones up to the thrills and pains in life.

I am so lucky! I know and meet the most interesting people, I feel loved by them, I feel safe to share.

What a thing to feel!

What fortune!

In these most recent years I’ve become a kind of a devotee to “how it feels”, more than “how it looks” or “what I should do”. When I engage should and look, I find it useful to notice which aspects of me are in the drivers seat and where it takes me.

Some of my experience in this process has been unorthodox and strange and I’ve been very worried at times I would hurt people by not being what I thought I was, or what I wanted you to think I was. It’s embarrassing to be a person! So cringy to change! Heavy is the head that crowns itself in hyper-vigilance.

When I look through a technical (stay safe) or pathological (you’re not good enough, yet) lens I am not aware of this other “feel” thing. Feel is a different vibe, so now I am practicing feeling, which is goodhard.

A few weeks ago I was processing a core memory of being hit as a child and you know what I remember most? I most remember feeling in absolute awe that after the first punch you don’t feel it anymore.

What skill!

What a perfect mechanism!

And I was right. On one side of the coin our nervous system does something protective and evolved, but this dissociative state of not-feeling as a way of life got real deep on lack and deep on numb as it worked its programming for the last 40 years.

Learning to paint has taught me that I’ve done technique (stay safe) long enough to be burned out so now I am raising the energy of expression (I am safe, I feel safe). Sometimes “feel” is good looking and smooth but often it ain’t. But then again what the fuck is “good”?

The things about us, the ways we are and were brave in what @lidiamiles calls, “the face of fuck” may be called wounds, but wounds can also be voids, voids can be filled with whatever we put there to be amplified and materialized as our lens and life.

William Black, Staying Awake

“Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And three fold in soft Beulahs night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newtons sleep”

– William Blake

the arrow goes where it will go

I’ve had some pretty cool experiences in my life but this one really stands out.

A group of close friends hired me, met me out at the Salt Flats and when we got there the salt flats were flooded. Water everywhere. One of our cars got stuck, we had to get towed. We pivoted together, making something out of the unexpected- beyond original vision.

I hold the ideas that initiate a creative work very lightly. Creative results aren’t beholden to the initiations that bring them into life, anymore than we live genuinely when beholden to what our parents think we should be.

We
steady the bow
and the arrow goes
where it will go.

And that’s good enough.

stein, god, there there

God, in the form of Gertrude Stein, said “There is no there there.” What a liberating and grief laden burden joy to be a human on earth and what wonderful wonders to frankly forgive “there” and “someday” or “then” and “nostalgia” and see now, now, and now as the only, only, and only.

Client Review, Andrea Updike

“I cannot believe how uninhibited I felt shooting with Ashley. I have SO MANY issues with how I see myself and my appearance in real life AND in photos and I didn’t care about that at all during the shoot. Those concerns that feel like bricks were not even present. I had COMPLETE trust that whatever we were going to create together, I would love.

Ashley also created an EXPERIENCE that provided absolute specific intention and purpose for the shoot. This was not about taking "cute photos where I hopefully look thin to myself and others," NO, not one single ounce of that. This was about something so much more, about documenting motherhood, womanhood, and the human details of my life at this very moment with two heaping scoops of my unique style & personality - none of which is actually tangible and CAN ONLY be presented/captured by artists alike because it is ALL a matter of interpretation.

It is not even about the physical things I wore during the shoot even though I love them, they were vehicles of sorts - this was about all the feelings, emotions, and energy I described above directly associated to the true intention of the shoot.”

Thank you, Andrea. For trusting me and yourself enough to make a magic neither of us could have made alone.

COLLABORATION // A Brief Waltz in a Little Room: 23 Short Plays About Walter Eyer

My continued partnership with Sackerson is a source of deep pride and pleasure. From the actors and artists to the organizers and minds behind each production, I am urged to go deeper and tell evermore true and important stories, more honestly.

Sackerson's upcoming immersive show "A Brief Walt: 23 Short Plays About Walter Eyer" has just been announced today and tickets are available beginning August 23rd. A Brief Waltz is a thought-provoking and intimate experience with heart, story, and feeling pulsing at the heart-center of this worthy cultural story written by the brilliant Morag Shepherd Alex Ungerman Shawn Francis Saunders and Matthew Ivan Bennett.

Images and art direction by Ashley Thalman Photography
Hand painted canvas backdrop by Ultraviolet Backdrops
Actor/Character with Robert Scott Smith

Portraits with Maddie Beeton

I remember the first time I met her. The women crowded around the pine cabin table set off-center in the room. She wore a tank top. Hair pulled back, rings, earrings, jeans, whatever. The soul showed. I held back my feeling of recognition because I was the host this go around and she the attendee but, I knew I had found a friend.

Maddie Beeton is filled with insight and poetry. She is soul wise, curious, brave and adventuresome. We’ve consumed so much coffee and cried and laughed knowing they are the same thing. I like to cook for her, she likes to listen. We like to rip the world apart and put it back together again with time and the time we chose to spend together.

A few weeks after my ex-husband moved out I had a stem cell transplant in my eyes and she was there. She knew the divorce was long-coming. She had been there, she knew.

I wish every woman had the blessing of someone who had been there, and could understand. She knew the pattern that came of sobbing sorrow and the way that good memories come back for seconds, dipping into regret. She was there day after day, tending to my home, my dog, my heart, my strange and specific needs for darkness. She knew that I was recovering from a binge of bravery that only time would sort. And it’s sorted. And Maddie has been that rare friend that cheers me. She loves when I’m doing well, she foresaw a lot of the good that I’ve found and she reflects that back to me with kindness.

Maddie isn’t afraid of being in the middle of life, on the frays of the uncomfortable, uncommon, or wild. We go together like that. She is one of the most dear people to me and I love her without end.

I photographed Maddie at Ultraviolet Studios and we followed the session up with food and talking about aliens and the soul. As we do. You can find Maddie and her adventures on Instagram at @madelinebeeton and at her website HERE.

Seen- Nursing Portraits

Only a few days after giving birth, shirt stained with mother’s milk as she lives and breaths the new life from inside to outside her.

This is one of the myriad ways motherhood takes and gives and changes shape. A peek into the world of motherhood, of the fourth trimester, of the hazy days so precious and heavy and fast.

This is a phase, a phrase, a holy blip of a consequential ritual with tethers that bind us from ancestor to far-flung successors.

Thank you Stephanie for letting me see and share.

Photo of Stephanie Hawkes. Find Stephanie HERE

Canvas backdrops by Ultraviolet Backdrops

Portraits with Errin Julkunen Pedersen

Errin and I have created beautiful love story that involves a cast of colleges, children, poets, parents, bishops, prophets, and partners. It is a story set in early morning apartments with positive pregnancy tests, late afternoon hikes in rocky canyons, memorable and terrible concerts and their crowds, drinks and laughter, sobbing seriousness, pomogranates in post op, churches filled with hymns.

How can you measure the depth of a decade long sisterhood where honesty, fear, triumph, career, motherhood, partnership, divorce, dancing and indelible encouragement has cheered you both on? You receive the gift, you witness it mature.

Last month as part of my Portrait Woman:: Mother event I hosted Errin as my honorary mother at my space, Ultraviolet Studios. This session gave me an intimate and new vision of a woman I already know so well. I know her goodness. I know her fear. I know her aims but mostly, I know her work. I know the texture of a life she has decided. I have witnessed her move from a university mainstay to a tenured and widely appreciated professional, from a wanting mother to a seasoned one, from wise to wiser.

There are few people in this world who carry poetics and purpose into the soul like she does. She is deeply moral, hysterically witty, and is smarter than any mother fucker in any room, and by god- the most stylish.

Errin recently shared the following regarding her work, to both understand and become increasingly empowered, by her journey with bipolar disorder. It’s this kind of openness with encouragement that Errin does so perfectly.

“You will think you can do it all. You will be wrong. You will try so hard and fail miserably. You will lose your shit when you can’t control everything. Your greatest challenge will be recognizing that you don’t control anything. You will punch things until your hands bleed, trying to find some respite. You’ll feel like a shitty mom, a bad friend, a failing spouse, and worse. But. You’ll remember. That it passes. That every bad thing as much as every good thing brought you to where you are. That no matter where you are, it’s where you are supposed to be. I’m always trying to remember.”

Like attracts like, our matches in soul and system find and refine us. Whatever goodness I hold that pulled this brilliant woman and me together in this incarnation makes both of us lucky indeed. I love you Errin sister.

You can find Errin on Instagram at @incrediblejulk

Hand painted backdrops by Ultraviolet Backdrops

Errin Julkunen Pedersen photographed by Ashley Thalman at Ultraviolet Studios Utah.

To the "Too Much" Woman

What hides away when we show one side?

What parts have we divorced, and where did those parts go?

What does it mean to make a welcome home for self, after we sent her away?

Where does she wait until we’re ready?

Woman, you do not fit into narrow prescriptions.

You are an endless landscape, an ecosystem entire of light and dark, rot and flowering.

You are the seed breaking forth, angry and determined.

You are the dark soil parting and nourishing.

You are the gift that the world called forth, you are whole and holy, you don’t need what you don’t already have.

You are sprout and root, stem and leaf, not a mere flowering part.

You are all the death that hides and the life that brings you back, again and again.

This is the true story of woman.

Muse Magic Music // Bad Girls- M.I.A.

Airportraits with Mo Amer

It was an October Monday in the quiet Edmonton airport where I met Mo. It was a chanced meeting and, like foreordained companions, we passed through TSA, through the sad terminal architecture, through the heavy-handed duty free gift shop- as a pair.

Taking cues from time and place, we chose a corner where the light was right, a place to talk and share. In that place we were seen and we saw each other. The truth is that Mo blessed me by being seen and showing up like he did. Connection, kindness, consideration, and fantastic light is all around us. And Mo, he’s experienced, artistic, deep, and funny. It has been so amazing in the last year and a half to see and watch Mo’s light and depth shine in a world that needs his voice, needs his generosity and humor.

I'll Be Damned

My daughter took this photo of me at Andi Pitcher’s cabin. No bra, lounging around, yesterday’s makeup, wild hair. It was a lazy morning, the kind that I’ve given myself permission to have. The sun was so warm there. Dotter raised the camera and I had a choice to make. I could have silently protested the portrait by letting her take it overexposed or by shewing her away, “Not until I’m dressed” or “No, let me take some of you.” But I didn’t, I set her exposure and let her see me.

My daughter is 10, the age so many of us began to pull at our skin, to notice lines in the abdomen when twisting, the way thighs pucker, the way we didn’t measure “right”. We inherited this from the work not done before us and I’ll be damned. I’ll be damned to be another woman pulling at puckers and hating my body, demonstrating this for my children and friends. I will not pass this on. I will let her take the photo and I will take hers, and yours, and again and again.