Danny Bracken’s work explores technological change and its impact on our perceptions and experiences of the people and places that surround us.

Grounded in the specific flora, geology, and hydrology of São Miguel and set against a backdrop of its growing tourism industry, Little Piece of Heaven is a collection of works that look at the beauty and absurdity of our desire to encapsulate nature, replicate the physical world, and reproduce lived experiences. It’s a reflection on the physical, economic, and cultural impacts we have on the places we visit and the ways we are changed by them in turn. As travelers visiting unfamiliar worlds, we often bring with us a desire to take a piece of that world home with us—souvenirs, postcards, selfies—to ensure that we will remember what we experienced. Paradoxically, this also ensures that the thing we remember is the object or a photograph, arrested and static, not the experience itself. It becomes a stand-in. It becomes evidence that we were there.