The Thing that Made You
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“someone will remember us
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I say
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even in another time”
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— Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
Everything comes down to family history. For the last several years, I have been working with my family’s archive searching for the visual language that will enable me to bring my family’s history to life. Since memory is unreliable, and in other cases, I wasn’t even born, I have deeply drawn upon my imagination to speak with these images. They begin with a photograph from a family album, that I take into Photoshop, and author with all the creative tools at hand. Added to the family photos are family letters, and my own images.
At the core of my creative process is the urge to follow my intuition, an emotion, unexpressed or acknowledged. When I think about my childhood, there are some things I know, or think I know and so much more, I’ll never know. The question that drives this work is simple––What lies hidden in a family album?
