Where We Surface

I return again and again to what a body carries from what it has endured, what it has inherited, and how those traces shape what it is still becoming.

My work investigates the ways women’s bodies hold, inherit, and pass down trauma. I think of the body not as a fixed form, but as a vessel where memory, identity, vulnerability, and transformation accumulate. This began through photographing my younger sisters, Phoenix and Nova, as they moved through girlhood. Watching them, I often recognized parts of myself—the same tension of simultaneously craving and resisting becoming a woman, and the strange ways our experiences repeat and diverge across generations. When Phoenix became seriously ill and underwent a bone marrow transplant, these questions became inseparable from the physical body. A body I had photographed changing through adolescence suddenly became medicalized, monitored, and vulnerable. I began looking beyond the human body toward other forms that carry evidence of what they have endured, including ophiolites: fragments of ancient oceanic crust transformed and brought to the surface through tectonic upheaval. Their fractured surfaces gave me a language for thinking about how pressure and trauma can alter a body while leaving traces of what came before.

Repetition has become the formal language through which I connect these histories. I think about trauma being passed down through families, patterns repeating across generations, and the ways we inherit things without always realizing we are carrying them. In Ophiolite, I repeat women’s bodies through multiple exposures until flesh and stone begin to merge; on my period-stained underwear, portraits of women young and old repeat within a grid, connecting the recurring menstrual cycle of my own body to a collective history. I am interested in the fact that repetition never produces an exact copy: an image fades, a body changes, a memory shifts. What we inherit is repeated, but it is also altered by each body that carries it. How much of who we become is our own, and how much has already been inherited?