Meet photographer Lyn Swett Miller and enjoy her exhibition, “Meandering Mold: Messages from a Garden Library,” at a special reception in the Mezzanine Gallery.

Lyn Swett Miller is a micro-climate photographer living in Quechee, Vermont. For more than a decade, compost has been her muse for photography and metaphor for everything. Objects, like a vintage Shakespeare, her mother-in-law’s thesaurus, and her Harvard diploma, found new meaning when mixed with food scraps, inspiring questions about not just food waste and consumption, but also about privilege and the power of narrative. Recent work includes “Lebanon Landfill – An Intimate Portrait,” “Meandering Mold: Messages from a Garden Library,” and 13 Tons of Love, a weekly newsletter on Substack. Lyn is an active member of the Kinship Photography Collective.

Artist Statement

“Saturated pages congeal, micro-organisms find a home, and poetry presents itself. Welcome to my Garden Library, a living laboratory where, for two years, groups of books slowly decomposed between logs, offering stage ‘sets’ for ephemeral fungi and meandering mold.

“When I first brought books to this once-forgotten part of the garden, I was grieving the deaths of my brother-in-law and mother. I’d recently cleared out a collection of art history texts, but there were too many for the compost pile, where I’ve often integrated old books. Longing for solace from the land, something no book could provide, I wondered what the earth might create when she interacted with these tomes.

“My intention was to document these objects for years as they “melted” into the earth. Instead, we decided to move, so I cleaned that part of the garden. This collection reveals what I found. After many moons, the earth had embraced the books, filling their pages with entirely new kinds of art. The images offer messages from the future and the past converging within these old reference books. This work invites conversation on the meaning of mark-making and narrative as well as on earth’s regenerative, transformational, and renewing power.”