Departures specifically relates to my family and often to my years spent as a runaway during my late teens. While incorporating playful elements, this series focuses on loss and catharsis. My first idea for
Departures was derived from a particular memory. At 8 years old, while playing hide and seek in the funeral home that my grandfather owned, I ran into the foot of a corpse lying on a gurney. My grandfather was a coroner for many years, and I sometimes felt guilty that his close association with death was frightening to me. In some ways these feelings colored my world view as a child. The deaths of friends and family are the starting point for the work in this series.
Some of the pieces reflect specific loss, as well as childhood memories, family myth, and my chronic insomnia. Nightmares is an ongoing series in which I explore some of the nightmares that contributed to this insomnia. I made each piece is using of a combination of photograms and scanograms, resulting in a scene that uses photographic elements to create an image resembling an illustration. These images are flat, and often use toys and natural objects as props. I often draw my work from the overly-dramatic, slanted perspective from which children observe their world.
As the mother of three small children, I spend a great deal of time photographing my family. I am drawn to imagery of youth and childhood; childhood tends to be a universally relevant subject matter. Frequently, I feel there is a connection a viewer can feel toward an image of a child that isn’t present in an image of an adult. Children are pliable models, and images of them are often a means of self portraiture.
