When my Nana died, my mom inherited decades’ worth of hoarded objects—thousands of photos and their duplicates and triplicates, hundreds of pens, at least five copies of every newspaper clipping mentioning a loved one. Much of this was quickly purged. I felt that an undiscovered history was slipping through my fingers. In their overwhelming repetition, those objects had meant something to the woman who had collected them, and, for better or worse, I too must have some genetic predisposition to tactile sentimentality.
Everything that remained found new lodging in the basement of my family home, alongside the physical remnants, saved by my mom, of my own childhood. In preparation to sell the house, again began the process of reduction, this time encompassing the artifacts saved by three generations of women, dating back at least a century. I grew ill-fatedly protective over disappearing objects that seemed to represent my connection to some ambiguous past, despite my longstanding sense of alienation within my family, and then to the house itself, despite how often it hadn’t felt like a home. It wasn’t that I wanted to keep everything or to remain there, but that I struggled to conceive of a path forward that lacked a tangible history, that was entirely severed from the sites of memory.
Aware of the spatial burden of memory, I turned to photography as a means of preserving what I could not keep from my childhood and family history, originally focusing on objects and spaces and then moving into the realms of emotion and experience. These are things I could never touch or hold but which, more than anything else, have furnished my life.