Artist Statement

My practice begins with photography, but I am interested in what happens when the photograph refuses to remain only an image. I work through photography, installation, photo transfer, wood, beads, fabric, found objects, and other materials to investigate how images acquire physical presence and how materials themselves can become carriers of memory.

At the centre of my practice is an ongoing question: How can a photographic image inhabit an object and transform it into a vessel of memory?

I approach this question through what I describe as experimental interrogation — a process of asking “what if?”, testing materials, allowing accidents and failures to remain visible, and letting each encounter between image, object, body, and space lead to another possibility. I am interested not only in what a material can support, but in what it already carries: its histories, textures, vulnerabilities, associations, and traces of previous use.

Portraiture is central to this process, although I do not understand a portrait simply as the representation of a face. A portrait may reside in a body, an object, a family photograph, an inherited possession, a landscape, a building, or the residue someone leaves behind. I am particularly interested in moments when the body is concealed, absent, fragmented, or replaced, yet a sense of presence remains.

Through this expanded approach to portraiture, my work moves through three interconnected concerns: memory and absence; material transformation and expanded portraiture; and the body, identity, and burden. These concerns allow me to examine how personal and collective histories are preserved, forgotten, inherited, or reconstructed over time.

Material transformation is important to how these ideas unfold. In works such as The Extent of Nothingness, photographic images are transferred onto wooden logs, allowing the sitter to move from a flat photographic surface into a sculptural encounter. In Beautiful Burden, an eight-kilogram beaded wig transforms adornment into weight, concealment, presence, and burden. In Our Forefathers, photographs and objects become ways of thinking through ancestry and remembrance. Across these works, the object does not simply carry the photograph; it enters into conversation with it.

Increasingly, my thinking about portraiture has also expanded toward place. I am interested in whether a town, landscape, building, or community can be approached as a portrait — not through one definitive image, but through the people, objects, histories, absences, and memories that accumulate there. This developing inquiry asks how photography can listen to a place rather than simply describe it.

Ultimately, I am interested in the unstable space between presence and absence, image and object, beauty and burden, remembrance and forgetting. My work asks what remains when the body is no longer fully visible, and how photographs, objects, materials, and places might continue to hold traces of human lives long after a particular moment has passed.