"Fragmented"

Our sense of identity is tied closely to our memories – where we came from, what we have done, what we have had done to us. Many of those glimpses of our past do not come with conscious recall, but surface when we see a particular image, catch a certain smell, or hear a snatch of music. In this way, our identity is pieced together from fragments of memory to make us whole.

 

Using the historical photographic printing process of cyanotype, I create a sense of nostalgia and age that extends a physical quality to pieced-together memories. I use found photos from old family albums and scan to create digital negatives from them. Multiple photographs and fragments of images are pieced together to create the final composition, similar to how we merge time into memories.  Using the tea toning process, I take the cyanotypes from vivid blue to a warm brown. This creates a visual reference of time passed similar to that of older photos that have faded over time, turned brown, and are worn. It visualizes a time and place that are no longer clear, but still a dominant characteristic of things that have, and continue to shape our lives.