Cut And Fold

Cut and Fold explores the search for a place to call home, of trying to fit into new places, and the slipperiness of language.

I am new here. I take photographs to help me look outside myself, to shape my view of the world and understand where I belong in it. Having lived abroad since 2012, I long to feel at home and have a pervasive feeling of not being in the right place. 

My time in Europe is underlined by a feeling of never quite getting my meaning across. I want to be able to communicate and to be understood in this world full of new languages and codes. My camera is a device that turns everything into a subject, that lets me look with close intention at the world as it indifferently goes on around me. I am drawn to photograph things that are covered up or draped over, species of plants thriving in the city, quiet moments of people going about their daily lives, things hiding in plain sight.

I cut up my photographs and make collages from them because I want to live in the tactile world of analog images. I show you the reverse side of the image, because I want to know, when did you last think about images as physical objects? These analog images have stories to tell, they carry their biographical information with them, like all of us. While the front of a photograph conveys the main story, the reverse side whispers a message too, if only we could decode it. Unlike the automatically generated data of digital images, the metadata of analog images is chemical, physical, encrypted.

All this is to say, when I take photographs of a veiled and quiet world, when I present to you the cut up backs of photographs, it is because I want to show you how slippery meaning can be. Like static on the radio, like a failed transmission, I hope for the meanings in these images to fall apart. If I feel lost, I want you to feel lost too.