about
My art practice has always used photography as a means to to tell stories. The frame of the photograph often becomes a stage where I act out and re-imagine real moments from my own life, attempting to document what I feel I am unable to capture with the camera. I am most interested in where reality and fiction intersect: moments of heightened awareness where everyday experience becomes transcendent or in the attempt to visualize the invisible: wishes, anxieties and fantasies.
My current work, Securing Shadows explores the transience of childhood from my perspective as a mother. These images are photograms, one of the earliest forms of photography. No camera is used; instead, I am working with my family and myself as subjects, laying our bodies directly on top of light-sensitive paper to create white silhouettes. These images draw upon personal symbolism and reenact moments from our lives, including both the imaginative play-words of my children and the daily struggles/joys of parenting. Motherhood has given me a new sense of time and mortality. Like Wendy from Peter Pan, I am desperately trying to pin down the shadows of my ever-growing children. This work is an attempt to capture the intangibility of this fleeting time and create meaning around what we imprint upon our children either intentionally or unintentionally and how this may affect who they grow to become.
My work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the RISD Museum, the Griffin Museum of Photography and Les Recontres de Photographie, France. I am an Associate Professor of Photography in the Department of Art & Art History at Bridgewater State University and make my home and work in Rhode Island.
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