unfinal shapes

My work, unfinal shapes, combines cyanotype, sculpture, and installation to investigate the impacts of trauma and the shadow it casts upon memory, experience, and identity. These impacts do more than sunder the physical, they erode the interior—memories retreat, synaptic pathways contract, the shattered pieces of identity entomb. Trauma is not something that simply happens, but something that becomes. A shifting of self that rearranges to a shape that fits between the voids left behind. As the victim of abuse, the shape I took no longer feels like my own.

My practice is guided by an effect known as “memory amplification,” in which victims of traumatic events often recall those memories in exaggerated detail. Pain becomes heightened, and that memory transforms into something different. This “something different” is where my practice finds its purpose. I create new shapes from broken things. Using rotted wood and salvage as a proxy for self, I wrap these found objects in cyanotype fabric, which simultaneously act as documentation and death shroud. I then bury them for the earth to swallow and time to distort. Later, I exhume each item to reveal their new shape—a sculptural approximation of the something different that occurs in traumatic memory recall.

These bound memorials compel the viewer to consider the painful nature of the things long lost and perhaps remind them of our individual ability to lay them to rest. unfinal shapes is an invitation for others to contemplate the shapes of grief that haunt their memory by transforming the photographic into the sculptural.