In my work I combine a love of photography with a background in visual communication to create documentary and transformative art which is my interpretation of real moments as they evolve into memories.
Over the past 14 years I have been gathering collections of photographic imagery. Sometimes I use un-manipulated “straight” photography in order to tell my story. Other times I use my photographic images as individual components within a single piece. I fuze them into layers of bees wax and damar resin, a medium called encaustic. Within this medium I employ collage, non-traditional framing, grids, panoramic imagery, as well as the drawn and painted line to transform my photographic images into encaustic paintings. I view these paintings as memories of the imagery that is depicted within them.
Representations of memory, documentation of places, and collections of everyday functional beauty evolve into stories and then memories of those stories. I think about the relationship photography has with truth and where the line is drawn between that truth and the memory attached to it. How much manipulation of a photograph is required before it is considered altered? How much manipulation is allowed before the truth fades into fiction?
In both photography and my encaustic work the medium is a part of the challenge. I can alter my photographs on the computer, or I can alter them with paint and encaustic medium. These are choices I make with intention. There are endless options when it comes to creativity in both realms, wax doesn’t dry as paint does, and therefore can always be reheated and reworked. A digital file has the same eternally re-workable quality, so when is the process complete? Likewise, every time we recall something we change that memory, my goal with my work lies in how to best translate this idea of the photographic image into imagery representing the constant change of the evolving memory.