“Perhaps no medium is in closer dialogue with parenthood than photography, which is, after all, a reproductive technique. […] Photography, like family, is stalked by questions of power, of ownership, of autonomy.”

- Max Norman, “Look Mom! When Photographers and Their Parents Collaborate,” Art in America, December 9, 2024

Generational Layers

Since I moved from Australia to the house across the street from my parents, I have been making images about family lineage and family as an ecosystem: how stories, things and bodies are passed down the line, and how communal narratives are created, recreated, and contested within lineages. I have been working in collaboration with my late grandmothers, my parents and my two children, and using layering of all kinds (in the image, in the making process, in the install) to bring these concerns into my photographs.

Newly-diagnosed with a hereditary connective tissue disorder, I keep thinking about genes as gifts of life from the previous generations but also of illness and death, carried in our bodies, heirlooms of the double helix kind. The body is a bag, carrying little pieces from all the ancestors, jostling together like in Le Guin’s carrier bag of fiction, carrying them into the future.

Thich Naht Hahn suggested doing a walking meditation as if you were walking with your mother, that enables you to get closer to them once they have died. He said, “it’s possible for you to walk with the feet of your mother. You can say, “Mother, would you like to walk with me?” And then you walk with her […] You free yourself and you free her at the same time, because your mother is in you, in every cell of your body”.

Last spring I got out my camera and invited my late grandmother Libby, whom I never met, to make some pictures with me. My father kept the story of her life and death a secret from me until I was in my late twenties, leaving a big hole in our lineage. I’ve been told he did this to protect me from a story of madness and institutionalization, but I’d like her back. I found one of the only remaining photos of her and put it into a projector to conjure her through imagery, to superimpose her on myself and my kids, to invite her to see through my eyes, to bring her back into the family and restore her to the narrative, photographically. But also, to disrupt the passing down of ableism and erasure to the next generation, my children.

My hands, my feet, they are also the hands of my grandmother. My children’s feet are my feet, and my mother’s, and her mother’s. My eye looking through the camera lens is my father’s, and my grandmother’s, borrowed by me for this lifetime. You got your grandmother’s eyes.

Generational Chimera Inkjet on polypropylene, aluminum grill, brackets, clips, fishing wire Fisher Center Gallery, Bard College, 2025