Blood Makes the Grass Grow examines the landscapes of North Carolina, weaving together battlefield memorials with a lasting military call and response:

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What makes the grass grow?
Blood, blood, blood!
Who makes the blood flow?
We do!, we do!, we do!

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This chant, deeply embedded in warrior culture, serves as a lens through which the project unpacks the entanglement of violence and collective identity within the American historical landscape.

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Photographed across sites of military remembrance such as battlefields, monuments, cemeteries, and memorial parks, the series reflects on the ways we shape and preserve these landscapes. It documents not only who visits these spaces and how they engage with them, but also what is elevated, what is forgotten, and how the land is maintained or left to weather with time. Visitors move through these landscapes in ways that range from reverent to recreational, revealing the layered and often conflicting relationships people have with sites of military memory.

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The project traces these gestures across landscapes tied to the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the violent displacement of Native peoples. It highlights how public memory often compresses or omits the complexities of conquest and resistance. Through these images, Blood Makes the Grass Grow asks how we honor, mythologize, or sanitize the violence embedded in the land. It confronts the legacies of conflict and colonialism, exploring how physical terrain, public memory, and patriotic ritual intersect in the making of American identity.