My capstone project this year is concerned with understanding and re-contextualizing the history of my family through my own hand. For a long time, I have loved looking at family photos and have become fascinated by the world held within those moments, and I wanted to take inspiration from these images and give them a new life by projecting them into a world more akin to the landscape of my own memory.

In order to do so, I looked at both old photos as well as more general artifacts, wanting to create pieces that felt as though they were relics of a time long gone. The subjects of the pieces come almost exclusively from family photos I have found, splicing and combining them to create new meanings. Often in my pieces, I also rip the edges and create irregular borders in order to make them seem as though they have been cut or decayed into an unnatural shape, revealing certain aspects of the past but concealing through their absence.

Photographer Sally Mann said southern artists are alike in their tendency towards romanticism and their concern with family, and I believe my work operates within a similar framework. I want viewers to be left with a feeling of love, ambiguity, and memory when they see my pieces, prompting them to think about their own family’s history and where they fit into that.