Madeline Cass’s latest work is a personification of place, an emotional reverie on a salt marsh near her hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska.
A mostly forgotten and misunderstood place, this inland salt marsh is moistened by groundwater seeps, with water nearly as salty as the ocean, where endemic and endangered species call home. Frank Shoemaker Marsh and the surrounding protected wetlands are what remains of Nebraska’s saline wetlands, one of the rarest ecosystems on the Great Plains. ‘how lonely, to be a marsh’ is an attempt to engender an elusive place not readily known – at once both heartfelt & heartbroken.
Cass combines her poetry and photography, images of botanical and zoological specimens, and early 1900s glass plate negatives and journal excerpts by pioneering prairie ecologist Frank Shoemaker. - Platte Basin Timelapse and Madeline Cass