Remnants

​Trauma (n.) – a deeply distressing or disturbing experience

Memory (n.) – a moment in time held within the confines of one’s mind


Everyone in this world is different from one another. Our experiences help to shape who we are and our differing worldviews. For the fortunate few, they go through life without being hurt by others, but for many of us we face monsters that make the devil seem friendly.

When we face these monsters, we battle with the memory of them and are left scarred and broken. We’re left to pick up the pieces and tie ourselves back together.

Once broken, you’ll never be the same as you were. You’ll be left with the trauma and the permanent affects it had on your brain. You will find yourself unable to remember your past clearly; memories will be distorted, frayed, or faded. You will find it hard to focus and hard to make connections to those around you.

What you see before you is a visualization of that struggle – Remnants of who I once was and parts of who I’ve grown into. You can watch how memories come in and out of view with the flow of time. See how some are lost or destroyed. You as the viewer get to wander through the forest that is the mind of a trauma survivor.

Know that all is not lost. Although trauma breaks who we once were, we get the chance to grow and use the lessons we were forced to learn to be better and stronger than we were before.

Like the struggle we feel trying to unearth the memories that our brains buried to cope, before you is two years of struggle to find myself in the work I was creating. For a while, I was creating just to create; acting on intuition and emotion, letting my work control me. It wasn’t until I started asking why I was creating these pieces that I started to learn how to control the memories that resurfaced when I created.

Through this work, I realized many things. Like the torn edges and delicateness of the paper, my mind and heart are delicate and had been through many years of tearing and abuse. Like the tones that botanicals brought to my imagery, my memories became distorted and discolored from the tainting that came from revelations about the men that had come and gone in my life. The chemistry of my cyanotype photographs unpredictably reacts to the things they’re exposed to similarly to how I unexpectedly react to triggers in my day to day. The tangle of the jute is not unlike the tangle that are my memories and my mind. The magnets that hold the pieces suspended in time push and pull each other to the surface, connecting memories that otherwise might not relate.

As I move forward in life and in my creating, I find myself healing through my work. Looking inward has been the driving force of my work and is what continues to drive me forward.