How to Burn a Memory

How to Burn a Memory explores trauma and its manifestations as a physical entity—encoded in DNA and passed between generations.

This series draws on epigenetics research suggesting that this inheritance is more than psychological: it can alter gene expression itself, embedding a parent's or grandparent's experiences at a cellular level. Working with my late grandfather’s Super 8 films and color-slide photographs, the series re-projects, re-contextualizes and transforms the archival material to make visible the distortion that occurs when memory travels through a body, a generation, a bloodline.

Now, my grandfather was a temperamental and difficult man. His outbursts shaped my mother's sense of self; alcohol became one way she managed this distortion, perpetuating its anxiety inducing effects on myself.  However, epigenetics suggests causation that moves in both directions: the same gene expression that primes me for anxiety likely primed them. Their harmful behavior was not random. It came from nervous systems wired to overreact, passed down and compounded across three generations.

The original footage—decades of material no one in the family had seen in over fifty years—shows familiar places filmed by a man each of us knew differently. The abstractions press that familiarity through a second transformation: light bent across physical surfaces, the image losing fidelity the way memory does as it passes from one body to the next. When I showed both the source material and the new work to my mother, her reaction confirmed what the project proposes—the anxiety we inherited is biologically the same, but our memories of the man who carried it are not.