At Farm Projects, a small gallery tucked off a storefront in Wellfleet’s main intersection, Milisa Moses’s “Sun Writings” capture a view of life on Cape Cod. Between shops selling paintings of light houses and oversized wine glasses, the photographs on view in “Sun Writings” transform the gallery into a place of worship for nature’s most fleeting moments.
Moses’s photograms and lumen prints capture the last moments of coveted sunshine before it turns into nourishing fuel for Cape Cod’s flora. Moses reveals the shadows of plants after soaking, spraying, and developing images through a process that blends alchemy, printmaking, and photography. The flight-filled images in “Sun Writings” are a way of preserving and honoring a single sunbeam’s legacy.
I’ve been lucky to spend enough summers and weekends on the Outer Cape to recognize the speckled alder or swamp rose shadows in Moses’s work. However, the reflection of the Cape doesn’t stop at the visual level. In so many of her pieces, I could feel the last bit of buried warmth as the sun dropped behind the dunes, or the scattered light shining through threads of pines along the trails just inland from the coast. Moses’s work is probably the closest thing to capturing those moments—short of planting a garden in a gallery.
Surrounded by her otherworldly forest at Farm Projects, we discussed the process behind her work, the allure of Cape Cod, and more.
Gray Goldberg: Can you tell me about this current body of work on view?
Milisa Moses: So the name of the show is Sun Writings and [the works] are literally writings of the sun. I use darkroom paper, and I either make a composition or I actually take them outside and place them within plants, and they sort of record the light—they record the shadows. I don’t use a developer; I just fix them so they won’t continue to expose, but that’s literally what it is.
GG: Beautiful. What do you hope viewers take away from this work?
MM: Awe. That’s what I get from these—the awe of things that are happening that we can’t see. The sun landing, the shadows, the parts of the plant that show up that you wouldn’t necessarily notice. It’s revealing these hidden worlds, but also the awe of these natural processes we’re unaware of and not necessarily a part of.
GG: Each piece looks so vastly different. Do you find yourself inspired by the work, or are you intentionally trying to convey a specific emotion?
MM: This is the one medium I’ve worked with where I feel so not a part of it, which is really freeing. With painting or drawing, there are expectations—in my mind’s eye I have an idea of what it should look like, and it doesn’t translate from my brain to my hands. That’s frustrating. But with this medium, the process is what matters: walking in the woods, finding a spot or a plant that interests me. There’s so much more that goes into it besides just making the print. And there’s no ego—no voice telling me what it should look like.
GG: Do you think it’s possible to bring that same ego separation to drawing or painting—or other media?
MM: I was at an artist talk last night with Anthony Fisher, who had broken his legs. So he was in his studio in these two casts, sitting in a chair. He was drawing and getting really frustrated—kept throwing drawings on the ground. He was wheeling his chair around, and then he looked down and saw all these wheel marks on the paper from the charcoal. That just took him to a whole other place. It’s a similar thing—letting go of the expectation of what something is supposed to be. A painting, a drawing, a photograph—whatever. There’s a kind of forgiveness that happens when you let it go.
GG: What’s the chemical difference in how you achieve something with a darker background versus a lighter one?
MM: Especially with the really dark ones, I’ve treated the paper with vitamin C. I take a tablet, grind it down with a mortar and pestle, add boiling water, let it cool, and then paint it on the paper. When I paint it on, it’s clear—so I don’t even know what I’m painting. Then, the minute it goes outside, it turns purple and pink. Once I put it in the fixer, it turns black. It’s wild. The vitamin C was really a game changer.
GG: What makes you decide which pieces should be a photogram versus a photo?
MM: I think they’re all interwoven. Whether I’m working with photographs or making a print, photograms involve more setup. Photographing feels like the first step. I’m lucky to have access to a printing press at the museum where I work, so I’ve been doing a lot of monoprints. There’s a technique called gum arabic transfer—it involves coating a photocopy. You take a photograph, make a high-contrast, crummy photocopy of it, coat it in gum arabic, and then apply ink. Whatever is white stays white, and the ink adheres to the black. Then you run it through the press. You can’t get a super detailed image, but I’ll look at a photograph and think, This would make the coolest print. I’m a huge fan of punk rock and stuff from back in the day, and they remind me of old record covers.
GG: And I’m curious about your book. What’s it been like transferring your practice across so many different mediums?
MM: It’s hard to juggle sometimes. To be honest, I haven’t made any new work because I’ve just been writing and researching for the book. But I still feel like that’s making art. You can tell from my work—I tend to veer off in a lot of directions, but they’re all connected. The book isn’t about one thing—it’s about how living out here in this creative place can fuel your creative impulses.
GG: Do you have a favorite piece in the show?
MM: There’s a dahlia print that was one of the first I did using vitamin C. When it came out, it looked like an X-ray to me. I didn’t know what to expect, and it absolutely blew my mind.
GG: It’s kind of otherworldly. This is your first solo show—has seeing your work in this space by itself changed your perspective?
MM: It’s been both amazing and weird—and uncomfortable—to have it all out there. But it’s been awesome to hear people talk about it: what they see or don’t see, or things I hadn’t even considered. And the gallery itself is kind of an anomaly out here among all the lighthouses. Going back to that whole music thing—I went to a lot of basement shows as a kid. I joked with someone that now it feels like I’ve graduated to this cool basement show, but it’s my show in this cool basement.
“Sun Writings” is on view through June 9, 2025, at Farm Projects, 355 Main Street, Wellfleet, MA.
