Shortly after her death I found myself sorting through a box of negatives she had saved from when she was a young woman, before she was my mother. While handling these fragile objects I was driven by a desire to “do something” with them. Rather than attempting to make something that would impose an imperfect interpretation, I decided to represent them as the objects they are and present them simply as is. Choosing to obfuscate what was originally depicted, I block access to its image, thus relieving them from the burden of holding a memory; a memory now impossible to recall as it belongs to only her. I do this because I feel I cannot speak for what these images meant to my mother and yet I have a desire to represent them none the less. Fingerprints, dust and scratches, on both the film and the scanner bed, hold the traces of those that have touched them over time. 

They say that at the end of life, the beginning returns. The two darknesses merge and the distance between the two collapses. If sorrow and beauty are connected, it may lie within the texture of longing. This project, for me, becomes a mapping of that empty space, the presence of absence.