Family Archives

My paintings sometimes begin with photographs, oral histories, and fragments passed down from my family. The meditative act of painting transcends documentation, into the emotional texture of remembering. This isn’t about recovering a singular truth, but about creating spaciousness within the image, where memory can shift, soften, and expand.
Grounded in family archival photographs, this body of work engages the domestic as a site of emotional density. Family can be both foundation and fracture, marked by tenderness, silence, dysfunction, and resilience. Domestic scenes, textiles, gestures, routines and rooms hold their own quiet drama. A shared glance, a beloved childhood object, or a shared meal can hold their own emotional architecture.The work seeks to foreground the affective charge embedded within the banal, marking the ordinary as a locus of the profound.
How does memory live between the visible and the withheld? I'm drawn to the space where photographs fall short. What lies outside the frame, blurred by time, resisting clarity? Through the act of mark making, these works fill the gaps where memory flickers sharp, partial, or wholly reimagined. Family members recur across works, not just as fixed portraits, but as emotional echoes, which I return to with curiosity and dignity, rather than conclusion.