In this new series of collages, I explore my family photo albums in search of connections, meaning, and material. Through ripping, cutting, and reassembling images—acts often seen as destructive—I reconstruct relationships, both personal and generational. Each fragment tells a story, forming intricate layers that trace life, death, and what remains in between. Central to the work are ultrasound images of my first child, born in December, subtly woven throughout the collages. These evoke the emotional tension between past and future, inviting reflection on family, memory, and the instinct to preserve. The ultrasound becomes both an intimate relic and a universal symbol, adding depth to themes of identity and transformation. The collages, made throughout my pregnancy last year, embody nostalgia’s duality—comforting yet deceptive—revealing the beauty, fragility, and unreliability of the stories we choose to keep.

I wondered who took all of these photos. Who staged them? Who processed the film? Who printed them? Who wrote the notes on the back, and what did they decide to write down? Who decided to keep them? And how did they end up here, in my hallway closet? Ultimately, each of these choices creates a specific narrative. What we choose to save, and share says something about what we want to remember and how we want to be remembered. Here are the legs of my maternal grandmother, Mary Ella Johnson Suter - and my paternal great-grandfather Henry William Wolf. They never met - born on opposite ends of the country and lived very different lives, but they are bound together now within the structure of my DNA.

Finding a New Normal (After the Storm)

Haywood County, North Carolina

I Just Saw Her Face

Waiting for Lily

At around 18 weeks of my pregnancy, I went in for the anatomy scan and saw for the first time my baby’s body move and stretch up on this big TV screen. It was absolutely incredible to see all of the bones of the spine and each hemisphere of the brain. It was an overwhelming experience as we learned that she was healthy and progressing perfectly. After years of trying, one miscarriage, and three rounds of IUI, it felt like a dream to see a person emerge from that black-and-white static. I took those ultrasound photos home and hung them up on the wall of my studio space. Slowly, they started to make their way into the family photo collages - sometimes overtly, but more often in subtle and structural ways.

Perhaps this is my way of introducing my daughter to her lineage and celebrating the continuation of the family line. It was a way for me to process these first images of my child and to begin to imagine how I might tell her the story of her family. How could I explain, for example, that her great-grandmother was beautiful but deeply unkind and caused pain that still ripples through our family today? Here, I took their two faces and connected them together, preparing myself for the possibility that they might look similar. How might that feel? It felt unsettling, but it also felt alluring.

This body of work became a space where I could hold these contradictions all at once. Collage allowed me to find connections and to shape a narrative that felt honest. The act of collage became a ritual of reconciliation: with the past, with the unknowns of birth and motherhood, and with the complexity of a family lineage. These works aren’t meant to resolve history, but to acknowledge it, to sit with its beauty and its weight. In making them, I hoped to offer my daughter more than just names and faces—I wanted to give her a visual language for understanding where she comes from and space to imagine how loved she really is.