Stills from stop-motion "photo-movies" and crushed eggshell sculpture, "Sophia"

Four Directions of Memory is an installation, realized through collaboration between my siblings and myself, begun soon after my brother Jim was diagnosed with cancer. We each submitted written reflections about images from my inherited family photographic archive. As I received these writings I reproduced and rolled them into bound scrolls dipped in wax. Recordings of our stories were laid in multi-tracked and layered sonic tapestries, with occasional individual voices coming through clearly. Through this work I construct a kind of map of perspectives surrounding people and events that were either shared directly or indirectly via family stories. In some ways these reconstructions help me to navigate my own history.
Although this project is about my family in particular, they are also intended to resonate on a larger level. They are ways of knowing myself through relationships with others and through my relationship with my art. My search for self-discovery involves listening to the stories that my siblings tell me (and themselves) about what they see and remember. By revealing what they know (or think they know) about our family’s past, I call into question the idea of historical authority or an objective point of view. The intimacy we have with photographs of our shared history is a personal perspective on a universal truth.