Gillian Peckham is a Seattle-based photographer whose work examines the traces we leave behind, finding metaphor and mystery however and wherever they appear. 

For thousands of years, the Duwamish River ran freely through this land, a living artery that sustained the Duwamish people who lived along its banks. A century ago, it was straightened and dredged and turned into an industrial zone. Over a hundred years of manufacturing left it contaminated, an EPA Superfund site whose slow, twenty-five-year reckoning stretches toward an unwritten future.

For most of us who live in Seattle area, the river remains largely invisible. Public access is limited and often unwelcoming. The high-level span of the West Seattle Bridge soars a hundred and forty feet overhead, carrying commuters across. But when a bridge closure forced a detour down to the water’s edge, I was compelled to look.

Just south of Seattle’s gleaming office towers lies a less examined landscape - a place where decay and resilience coexist. In the photographs presented for Intimate Structures, my aim is to step past the river's utility and recognize its agency as a living presence, visible even in what's been left behind: a cracked pipe, once meant to carry runoff, now abandoned on the mudflat.