who came near the house
2021
(from HOUSE RIDDLED)
My father died three weeks before Christmas when I was five years old. It was a sudden, tragic, and very public spectacle. My series, HOUSE RIDDLED, is the first time I attempted to “speak” about my childhood trauma using visual language, by revisiting and photographing exteriors of the homes my family lived in before and after the event. I began this project in 2021 for my photographic thesis (at Photographic Center NW), while I was also finishing my first book, Between, Everywhere. I completed both projects in June 2022, the same month I turned 40. My book was released on the 35th anniversary of my father’s death (via Minor Matters). While employing very different approaches, both projects offer insight into my complicated relationship to home and family. I don’t think each could exist in its current form without the other.
sophisticated negotiation techniques
2022
(from HOUSE RIDDLED)
All 32 images in HOUSE RIDDLED are titled using excerpts appropriated from the local newspaper articles about our family tragedy. By stripping these phrases from their original context and punctuation, I am able to recreate for an adult viewer what it’s like to experience something so life changing with the limited vocabulary, cognition, and comprehension of a 5-year-old. This is the first time I realized the synergistic potential of pairing words with images. Since then, words have been integral to my photographic projects.
the end of Alf - that’s when
2022
(from HOUSE RIDDLED)
In order to make HOUSE RIDDLED more complete, I had to deviate from my dedication to “the truth.” This photograph was an outlier made early in the project—a practice shot of an unrelated interior space—but it kept screaming at me to be included. It was time for me to get honest about what I was really making. Despite my stubborn intentions, the core of this work is about implicit memory and can hardly be considered “documentary.” Does it really matter that I didn’t grow up with this particular carpet, but something like it? This photograph forced me to let go of what I thought this project was supposed to be. And I’m glad. The interiors lay bare the unsettling quietude of grief and neglect that can accompany traumatic events - a much greater emotional truth than if I had stuck to “the facts” alone. I now believe a project will always tell you what it wants to be, if you can just humble yourself and listen.
desire made you
2023
(from Certain Grasping)
This photograph is from Certain Grasping, the first of a four-part series I made on the streets of Seattle at night. I had just finished two major projects and was struggling to pick up my camera. I had an iPhone and anxiety, and I hadn’t slept well in almost two years. The only thing I could do was walk. I had no plan for these images. I simply needed an outlet, lest I implode.
too tender to be
2023
(from Certain Grasping)
On these nightwalks, I was making visual connections between the organic and inanimate, seeing beauty tinged with decay, flowers everywhere. I was also reading a lot of poetry, so the titling for Certain Grasping was appropriated from Ama Codjoe’s poem, “On Seeing and Being Seen” from Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions). She uses photographic language to talk about desire, and this seemed appropriate for how insatiable (and compulsive) I felt while making this work.
This photograph was included in Ugly Child - Fragment II (Troubled Sleep), released in 2025.
another vision
2023
(from Two Silent)
This photograph is from Two Silent, the second zine in my four-part nightwalking series, where my mental health began to take a dark turn. My vision and thoughts were becoming more distorted as I entered my third year of not sleeping. My senses of sight and touch felt heightened and interchangeable, almost synesthetic, and yet my capacity for joy was nonexistent. I was struggling to make sense of feeling everything and nothing at the same time.
this is what you would find at the end
2023
(from Two Silent)
While making Two Silent, I was also reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The titles of these photographs were appropriated from a particular exchange between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, a smoke-filled conversation in which neither is certain if they had been speaking aloud at all. This chapter felt like an appropriate accompaniment to Two Silent, as I became increasingly lost in an interior landscape fueled by something obfuscating and inexorable: the unrelenting conversations, both real and imagined, I was having in my own head.
two, silent and motionless, watched
2023
(from Two Silent)
Two years on from making this photograph, I see so clearly now what I could not then: that I was unknowingly documenting my own addiction. The paranoia, the weight loss, the sleeplessness, the constant anxiety. For years, the photographs tried to show me what was happening to me, but I was too far gone to receive the message. All I could do was keep walking, if only to feel my feet touching the sidewalk. My one remaining tether to reality.
I’m honored this photograph was included in Float’s Good Impactful Photography zine, released in 2025.
revocable living
2023
(from Revocable Living)
Revocable Living is the third zine in my four-part nightwalking series. Many of these photographs were made on the last night I lived in the house I shared with my husband. My whole life, in every sense of the word, revoked by addiction: symbolically, legally, socially, and eventually, (almost) physically.
community ended
2023
(from Revocable Living)
Paired with images from the home and neighborhood I was soon leaving, the titles for Revocable Living were appropriated from our official divorce documents. No one prepared me for how the sterile, dehumanizing language of the legal system can sit in such stark contrast to the feral, visceral process of divorce.
you lost
2023
(from You, A Void)
My downward trajectory was going to end in one of two ways. I stared over the precipice of one, and was mercifully, miraculously offered another. You, A Void—the final installment of my four-part nightwalking series—was made during a 90-day, in-patient treatment program in Colorado. I made this body of work in ways I was completely unaccustomed: in broad daylight and completely sober. Finally detoxed and physically safe, I faced a whole new set of fears. Like, what kind of artist am I, without the amphetamines and excessive pain that fueled my most productive (and destructive) years?
This photograph was also included in Ugly Child - Fragment II (Troubled Sleep), released in 2025.
see how tired you are
2023
(from You, A Void)
After borrowing from poetry, prose, and legal documents, the titles in You, A Void are appropriated from the impact statements read aloud at my intervention. After years of photographing myself within a dark, urban environment, I spent 90 uncomfortably-sunny days facing myself in a mirror constructed from the words of my closest friends and family. It was painful and it saved my life.
My first solo gallery exhibition, Revocable Living, was comprised of 37 photographs across all four series together. It was hosted in February 2025 by Spectrum Fine Art in Seattle, WA. This image was also shown by The Curated Fridge (Somerville, MA) in their Autumn 2025 exhibition.