Hiraeth

I became interested in working with my family’s film photographs precisely because they are a physical reminder of when they were made.  The medium itself speaks to a very specific time when family photographs (mine and others’) were shared as physical prints and in albums rather than through the digital platforms of social media.  The sharing of a photo album was an intimate and revealing occurrence rather than a casual public event – you didn’t share your family albums with strangers because you generally did not invite strangers into your home.

It may seem contradictory that I choose to make paintings — paintings that I hope to show in public — based on my family’s private archive of photographs and my personal ones.  Yet I find that I make more interesting work using images of people I know and love rather than strangers.  Starting from the highly personal has paradoxically enabled me to speak more broadly about learning to live with emotional scars and burdens.  Thus painting these images and sharing the resulting artwork has become both a public and private act, as if a door was ajar at a vulnerable, revealing moment.