SARAH MCRAE MORTON

A net of north light is cast through a hay hatch in the barn loft above carriage horse stalls where I learned to see and began to paint. The light catches dust and swallows, coiled ropes and painter's eyes. The hatch's timber frame crops the surrounding landscape to a postcard view of farm fields stewarded by Amish neighbors. From some vantage points it is a bucolic scene. I see it riddled with questions and pocked with rabbit holes... Throughout childhood in rural Pennsylvania, I painted what I observed and what I imagined from my perch above a carousel of animals turning through the years, rotating stalls, making predictable but ceaselessly wondrous circles from new life to death. In the barn loft was a secret annex. It was hidden behind a panel of tongue and groove wood flush along the wall hung on rust brittled hinges. It had been a fort to a kid who left it cluttered with relics of his time and things he loved. By the time I leaned on the wall and fell into the room cast with..