Family Matters

This project is about the meaning of family connections and how imagining our ancestors and descendants shapes our sense of ourself and our behavior.

I often wish that my grandparents could see my children or struggle to understand my father's childhood as his father sold fruit from a horse drawn cart. In this series, I have put my ancestors and my children together in landscapes that have an ahistorical feeling.

COVID-19 has shrunk our worlds and given us a new perspective on our priorities. Immediate family has taken on a new centrality in many people's lives. We are experiencing a kind of crisis that for many people is new in our lifetimes. Plagues, wars, past crises feel closer than they ever have before. As my own mother, already struggling with dementia, contracted the disease while in a rehab clinic where no one could visit her, the importance of family became deeply personal for me.

As I have sheltered in isolation with my husband and children, I have been driven to think about the meaning of family, our connections over time, our relationship to the past, and what our debt to our ancestors and our investment in our descendants mean for our lives. WIth these images, I have developed a world which bridges space and time. Generations meet, my grandfather sits on the front stoop with the great grandson named in his memory, mother as her younger, healthy self, enjoys her grandchildren becoming adults.