Meaning Through Memory — Artist Statement

For many years, I collected bits and pieces from the past, drawn to the tactile—paper worn soft by age, wood darkened with time, dominos and dice with the nicks of use. I gravitated toward materials that hinted at a life once lived: letters in faded handwriting, assignment notes scrawled in the front of an old school book, receipts and forms that once passed through someone’s hands. These items, no matter how ordinary, carried traces of personality and presence—evidence of everyday lives. That human connection, however subtle, is what draws me in. These objects lived in drawers and boxes, saved from estate sales, thrift stores, and my own childhood. Only recently did they become the raw materials for my art.

 In Meaning Through Memory, my first solo show, I transform these long-held fragments into collages and assemblages that examine how memory functions—not just as nostalgia, but as a bridge between generations, experiences, and understandings. Each piece begins with play and experimentation. Materials are laid out, shapes are mapped, patterns emerge. I often build my compositions around squares to provide visual structure and to lay the foundation for meaning. My work may appear precise, but it is far from it. Vintage materials are unruly. Colors shift. Objects resist adhesion. In the tension between plan and possibility, the work emerges.

 Material, process, content, and aesthetics work in dialogue throughout my practice. What may initially read as orderly or decorative reveals deeper complexity upon closer inspection: layered meanings in the objects themselves—reminders of childhood, domestic life, play, and passing time.

 My assemblages often center around the idea that meaning doesn’t exist solely in what we remember, but in how we remember—in the objects we keep, the stories we tell, the patterns we repeat. At its core, my work explores how memory operates—not only as something we retrieve, but as something we shape and carry forward. Guided by a quiet spiritual grounding, I consider how the past informs the present, and how meaning emerges through the act of looking, remembering, and re-seeing. Through this work, I propose that the past is always present, and that there is great beauty and truth in the worn, the aged, the imperfect. My practice is less about preservation and more about transformation. Through these salvaged materials, we slow down, look closer, and consider what we carry forward from the past—and why.