Always Already (detail of binding)

Artist statement:

As a photo-based artist I work with ideas generated from lived experience using different photographic technologies and materials. My practice for the past 10 years has centered on exploring various ways memory, place and loss impact identity. I use analog photography and other low-tech processes, including printmaking and bookbinding, to explore these relationships.

I explored ideas around a temporary connection to place and its relationship to identity, memory and loss, through the creation of a series of handmade books. Referencing diaries, travel journals and photo albums, the books contain images made on road trips, (landscapes sliding by shot from the backseat of a moving car with a beautiful 1960s era Voigtlander manual camera that had been my parents when I was a child, I played purposefully with long exposure times emphasizing the feeling of moving through space, extending time) and script created with various printmaking techniques emphasizing visual and cultural connections between written language and photography.

I am interested in the malleability of memory and reference its reconstructive nature through my subversion of proper photographic techniques as well as decisions made towards the form of the books; the images are fractured as the binding threads are sewn through them; the photographic surface and edges disrupted with folds; the inclusion of barely legible hand-embossed and etched script. These books dislocate, fracture, pull apart and come back together inviting each viewer to create their own narrative.