she loved lavender

In 2016, I began assisting with the cleaning and organization of an aging relative's home. Presented with a lifetime of items raised questions of memory, nostalgia, and the power of sentiment. These images document my process of untangling narrative through archived objects. A blouse, pressed and preserved handkerchiefs, reels of film, a rosary, hand written letters in careful script, a length of hair neatly braided and stored in a delicate silk bag. Each object carries with it, a piece of an individual’s narrative - a moment in time. At what point does an object transform into artifact? How do we discern which objects are deserving of this transformation, and who do we preserve them for? Through this process, I engaged with the overlapping narratives of 6 women, a record of feminine Americana. Nostalgia has the power to distort time, fracturing and restructuring the linear construct of narrative. Each artifact becomes reanimated through a contemporary lens; retold, repeated, revisited, reimagined. Each narrative extract serves as a pinpoint in an overlapping constellatory structure of time reactivated through contemporary rediscovery.