Ashleigh Coleman: Piece of Heart
©Ashleigh Coleman, from Mississippi, Piece of Heart
This past September Alexa Dilworth (Director of publishing, awards, and DocX lab, senior editor of CDS Books at the Center of Documentary Studies at Duke University) and I flew down to the 16th Annual SlowExposures Photography Festival in Zebulon, Georgia. This was not our first rodeo with SlowExposures–we were paired to juror in 2014, and the experience was truly remarkable. It gave me my first introduction to small town Southern hospitality and exposure to a community that comes together to celebrate photographs created in the rural South, with enthusiasm and open arms. This year, we again had the privilege to consider Southern photographs and the result was a wonderful exhibition filled with a myriad of interpretations of all things Southern.
For the First Prize and recipient of the Paul Conlan Prize (receiving a solo exhibition during the 2019 festival), we selected a photograph by Ashleigh Coleman. It was a stunning and tender image of a young girl in a red sweater holding a blue bird, printed large for a mesmerizing effect. Today we feature her project, Piece of Heart, which includes the winning image, created from the perspective of a participant observer, capturing family and place from the the inside, but considering her world as an outsider as she puts down roots in unfamiliar terrain.
In addition to Ashleigh’s participation in the SlowExposures exhibition, she is part of the Due South Collective that had a dynamic show of photographs in conversation at the event. The group is gearing up for a exhibit at Fischer Galleries in Jackson, Mississippi this coming spring, as well as a other exhibits across the South in 2019.
©Ashleigh Coleman, Mississippi, Piece of Heart
©Ashleigh Coleman, Mississippi, Piece of Heart
Ashleigh Coleman was born in the mountains of Virginia. She received her BA in Art History and English from the University of South Carolina. Since 2010, Ashleigh has lived in rural Mississippi where her work explores the complexities of family life
and her relationship to the landscape.
Her work recently exhibited at The University of Mississippi’s Center for Southern Studies, The University of Southern Mississippi, The University of West Virginia, Soho Gallery, iLoni Gallery in NYC, Fischer Galleries, ASmith Gallery, SlowExposures, South X Southeast Gallery, and Southeastern Center for Photography.
Online her work has appeared, among other place, in Eyes on the South by Oxford American, Looking at Appalachia, Strant, and 51 Instagram Photographers to Follow in the U.S. by Time LightBox. Recent publications include Oxford American Magazine, Garden & Gun Magazine, Click Magazine, Okra Magazine, Let’s Explore Magazine, and Southern Glossary Magazine.
©Ashleigh Coleman, Mississippi, Piece of Heart
Piece of Heart
Through the floorboards and walls it quietly arrived. Enveloping the house. Seeping under the covers. The cold coiled itself around me – uprooted, isolated, and, seemingly, disconnected from everything that gave me meaning and purpose. Then, without warning, daffodils appeared in front of the abandoned church: bright and cheerful. A tractor plowed up the field surrounding our house. Spring catapulted into a long sweltering summer daze, which eroded into harvest. As the rhythms of the land sunk into me, I found myself steadying, studying, searching for home in this rural southern town. This is part of my journey—tentatively putting down roots and starting a family in a place I never expected to live. – Ashleigh Coleman
©Ashleigh Coleman, Mississippi, Piece of Heart
©Ashleigh Coleman, Mississippi, Piece of Heart
©Ashleigh Coleman, Mississippi, Piece of Heart
©Ashleigh Coleman, Mississippi, Piece of Heart
©Ashleigh Coleman, Mississippi, Piece of Heart
©Ashleigh Coleman, Mississippi, Piece of Heart
©Ashleigh Coleman, Mississippi, Piece of Heart
©Ashleigh Coleman, Mississippi, Piece of Heart
©Ashleigh Coleman, Mississippi, Piece of Heart
©Ashleigh Coleman, Mississippi, Piece of Heart
©Ashleigh Coleman, Mississippi, Piece of Heart
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![In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, four members of the United Klans of AmericaÑThomas Edwin Blanton Jr.,Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank CherryÑplanted a minimum of 15 sticks of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, close to the basement.
At approximately 10:22 a.m., an anonymous man phoned the 16th Street Baptist Church. The call was answered by the acting Sunday School secretary: a 14-year-old girl named Carolyn Maull. To Maull, the anonymous caller simply said the words, "Three minutes", before terminating the call. Less than one minute later, the bomb exploded as five children were present within the basement assembly, changing into their choir robes in preparation for a sermon entitled "A Love That Forgives". According to one survivor, the explosion shook the entire building and propelled the girls' bodies through the air "like rag dolls".
The explosion blew a hole measuring seven feet in diameter in the church's rear wall, and a crater five feet wide and two feet deep in the ladies' basement lounge, destroying the rear steps to the church and blowing one passing motorist out of his car. Several other cars parked near the site of the blast were destroyed, and windows of properties located more than two blocks from the church were also damaged. All but one of the church's stained-glass windows were destroyed in the explosion. The sole stained-glass window largely undamaged in the explosion depicted Christ leading a group of young children.
Hundreds of individuals, some of them lightly wounded, converged on the church to search the debris for survivors as police erected barricades around the church and several outraged men scuffled with police. An estimated 2,000 black people, many of them hysterical, converged on the scene in the hours following the explosion as the church's pastor, the Reverend John Cross Jr., attempted to placate the crowd by loudly reciting the 23rd Psalm through a bullhorn. One individual who converged on the scene to help search for survivors, Charles Vann, later recollected that he had observed a solitary white man whom he recognized as Robert Edward Chambliss (a known member of the Ku Klux Klan) standing alone and motionless at a barricade. According to Vann's later testimony, Chambliss was standing "looking down toward the church, like a firebug watching his fire".
Four girls, Addie Mae Collins (age 14, born April 18, 1949), Carol Denise McNair (age 11, born November 17, 1951), Carole Robertson (age 14, born April 24, 1949), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14, born April 30, 1949), were killed in the attack. The explosion was so intense that one of the girls' bodies was decapitated and so badly mutilated in the explosion that her body could only be identified through her clothing and a ring, whereas another victim had been killed by a piece of mortar embedded in her skull. The then-pastor of the church, the Reverend John Cross, would recollect in 2001 that the girls' bodies were found "stacked on top of each other, clung together". All four girls were pronounced dead on arrival at the Hillman Emergency Clinic.
More than 20 additional people were injured in the explosion, one of whom was Addie Mae's younger sister, 12-year-old Sarah Collins, who had 21 pieces of glass embedded in her face and was blinded in one eye. In her later recollections of the bombing, Collins would recall that in the moments immediately before the explosion, she had observed her sister, Addie, tying her dress sash.[33] Another sister of Addie Mae Collins, 16-year-old Junie Collins, would later recall that shortly before the explosion, she had been sitting in the basement of the church reading the Bible and had observed Addie Mae Collins tying the dress sash of Carol Denise McNair before she had herself returned upstairs to the ground floor of the church.](http://lenscratch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/001-16th-Street-Baptist-Church-Easter-v2-14x14-150x150.jpg)
