Where Memories Reside

This body of work is a series of portraits of found objects, land and seascapes, presented as small offerings, meditations to reflect on the passage of time, loss and transformation. It is about what may emerge from our memories when we silence and immerse ourselves in the act of seeing.

The project was conceived as a collection of images about the sea inspired by childhood experiences shared with my father. While influenced and guided by these encounters, I did not wish to create a documentary account of them. Instead, I wanted to compose a visual poem with a relative degree of abstraction that could potentially elicit in the viewers their own recollections.

In considering how to photographically represent my ideas, what surfaced first was a poem that suggested the themes for the project. As the lines of the poem came to me, before I could write them down, I found myself entering a state-of-mind akin to an encounter with remembering. This kind of memory was not a mental or visual recollection of specific moments lived with my father, but a visceral bodily apperception of the moment. I felt one with the sounds and shapes of the words as they came to mind and mouth, commingling with the external elements that elicited them.

Each time I went out to make the photographs I entered a similar state. A moment-to-moment experience, where the impulse toward particular elements in the external environment, combined with the act of making the images, I experienced as remembering.