Shaping the Familiar 

My memories act as a starting place for my work. Much of my work draws inspiration upon family and childhood photos from my life. Personally, many of my memories have become distorted with time, which is an important idea I explore in my work. I’ve come to use abstraction as a tool to create this sense of distortion and fuzziness that’s associated with memory. Layering images, creating paper weavings, blurring photos, are all processes that help me achieve the feel of a distant memory. When we take a photo we read it as reality, but through using abstraction in my work I’m able to create work that truly feels like a fleeting memory. Working with family photos has pushed me to do some self reflection and figure out how I want my story to be told. Creating this body of work has pushed me to realize that taking photos throughout one’s life is so important because we often remember photos, not the memories themselves.

At the beginning of the year, I was really just focusing on memories and how images affect our perception of memory. As I began to play with paper weavings more I began to realize that there was something really interesting about literally distorting the images in the same way that our memories themselves are distorted. This has come to fruition through layering of images on top of one another, along with creating across mediums. Both “Peace” and “Pose” are exemplary examples of mixing mediums. These works are created by me first taking images of a painting I created of images from my childhood weaved together. I then create prints of this painting taken from various angles and turn them into cyanotypes. Then I paint line drawings of various people from my life on top of the cyanotype print. We can see a mixture of mediums here, first turning my painting into a print and then painting on top of my print. I’ve found that this unorthodox way of creating makes a lot of sense in the context of my investigation, as the work has the feeling of a distant memory to it. Through mixing and matching various artistic methods, I’ve been able to create work that really conveys how I perceive my memories.