Artist Statement
My work explores connections to and experiences of place, landscape, environment, time and memory. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest and having a father who was an educator, we traveled a lot during the summer, mostly in North America. These travels instilled in me a wanderlust, which draws me to explore the landscape from a visual and research point of view. Travel also helped create my interest in our connections to and interactions with the environment that sustains us. Photography allows me to record and collect the visual images needed for my work.
Through my work, I investigate how personal history and memory are tied to place, how time informs memory, and how visual representation can be used to communicate experience. John Berger suggests, “that photography is rather like memory; memory is normally embedded in an experience and photography has the ability to record these experiences”. Our memories seem frozen in time, much as an image captured on film, yet the passage of time itself can alter our recollections. Like memory, photographs over time are never able to fully express the experience they represent. The use of images to recall memory helps to pull us back to a time or place. The place can be a physical landscape, a mental landscape, or combination of the two. Images become visual transports to memories of places that have in the past informed and continue to influence us today.
I often use mixed media in my work to suggest the layering of information we compile within our experiences and our memories. The layering in the work is an attempt to bring the viewer into my own complicated experience of these places and suggest the complexity of how we come to know a place. The map, often used as a background or under layer in the work, is a schematic of the geography and geology, a readable lay of the land, a foundation for text and images off of which to build. Text, drawing and painting provide other information that maps and photographic images may not be able to communicate. In the end, my pieces frame issues concerning place, memory, connection and representation, while exploring the notion of how experience may or may not be communicated and passed on.
Through my work, I investigate how personal history and memory are tied to place, how time informs memory, and how visual representation can be used to communicate experience. John Berger suggests, “that photography is rather like memory; memory is normally embedded in an experience and photography has the ability to record these experiences”. Our memories seem frozen in time, much as an image captured on film, yet the passage of time itself can alter our recollections. Like memory, photographs over time are never able to fully express the experience they represent. The use of images to recall memory helps to pull us back to a time or place. The place can be a physical landscape, a mental landscape, or combination of the two. Images become visual transports to memories of places that have in the past informed and continue to influence us today.
I often use mixed media in my work to suggest the layering of information we compile within our experiences and our memories. The layering in the work is an attempt to bring the viewer into my own complicated experience of these places and suggest the complexity of how we come to know a place. The map, often used as a background or under layer in the work, is a schematic of the geography and geology, a readable lay of the land, a foundation for text and images off of which to build. Text, drawing and painting provide other information that maps and photographic images may not be able to communicate. In the end, my pieces frame issues concerning place, memory, connection and representation, while exploring the notion of how experience may or may not be communicated and passed on.