Many people who enter Karma Salon & Gallery, as salon clients or art lovers, might see the photographs hanging on the wall as just some beautiful pictures of the coast of Maine. But for salon owner and artist Tim Adams, these photographs represent a woman dearly loved and missed.
Adams took the photos 11 years ago on his last trip to Maine before the death of his friend and client Martha Dunigan, a former instructor at the UNC School of the Arts and a well-known local artist. Dunigan died in 2001 shortly after retiring from UNCSA and moving back up north. For Adams and other friends, her death from pancreatic cancer at the age of 67 came as a shock.
"She had the most beautiful white hair, white-white hair, all the time that I knew her, so she never seemed to be any older than she'd ever been when I first met her," Adams said. "She was very tan, and she was kind of like a lobsterman herself, in the fact that she had that sort of rugged, outdoorsy look, so she never seemed that old to me."
For Adams, who spent time at Dunigan's summer house in the small, isolated fishing town of Jonesport, Maine, it is nearly impossible to separate Dunigan from the place where she spent so much time.
"Being this very sort of outdoorsy person, she would go up to Jonesport, and she would get in her rowboat, and she would row over to the other islands and pick up sticks and rocks and treasures that she found, and she would bring those back to North Carolina with her," Adams said. "A lot of the artwork that she produced through the years that I knew her was produced from found objects, stuff that she found on the coast."
Adams, a fellow artist, studied costume design at UNCSA before going to beauty school to be a hair stylist. He has also had a longtime interest in photography.
"My first camera, back in the '60s, was a Kodak Instamatic camera with a fixed focus lens," Adams said. "I've always been such a gadget person anyway, so as a kid I was fascinated by anything that was electronic. And by the time I was in college, I had my first professional camera, and I shot a lot of film from 1979 to, well, really probably the mid-2000s."
The switch to digital took away Adams' interest in photography. "It (digital) felt cold to me; it didn't feel like film had felt," Adams said. "There was always something kind of fascinating about having to wait for the film to come back and see what you actually got."
Adams found that the negatives he had tucked away in a drawer had deteriorated.
Regardless of proper storage, 11 years is long enough to wear away a negative, and Adams had to have his negatives professionally restored.
"Remembering Martha's Maine," his show, will run through February at the salon, and proceeds will go to a memorial fund set up in Martha Dunigan's honor years ago at UNCSA. Photographs of Dunigan's summer house, bright red Adirondack chairs, and the peaceful coast beyond all give the viewer a glimpse of her life at the shore.
"I was really trying to document where we were, and I was really trying to document the beauty of this place," Adams said. "I know that looking at these images will not mean the same thing to anybody else but me. This is very personal, because I spent so much time here, and she was such a dear friend of mine."
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement