Where We Surface

Where We Surface traces how women’s identities form under pressure. Through portraits of girlhood, rock formations, and material collage, the project explores inheritance, endurance, and visibility as the body and the land mirror one another.

My work begins at home, in a world shaped by women: my mother, my two younger sisters, and the chosen family we have grown around us along the coast of Bolinas, California. I use photography to trace the fragile space where girlhood softens into womanhood. The camera becomes a tool for holding memory and examining how identity is formed through intimacy, inheritance, and place.

Watching my younger sisters, Phoenix and Nova, come of age in the same landscape that shaped me evokes a sense of recognition. Observing them navigate their own experiences of girlhood prompts me to reflect on my own coming-of-age. There is an inherent tension in this act of looking, an acknowledgment of both shared history and individual divergence. Our experiences shape us in unpredictable ways, and through photography, I attempt to preserve and inspect this transformation.

Alongside portraiture, I photograph the surrounding landscape, particularly Ophiolite rock, fragments of the earth’s deep interior thrust to the surface through tectonic upheaval. Drawn to their exposure of what is usually hidden, I understand these formations as material parallels to women’s histories and spaces, which have similarly been fragmented, displaced, and reshaped over time. Bodies appear within and against these terrains, dissolving distinctions between flesh and stone. The human body and the land mirror one another, each marked by pressure, endurance, and transformation.

My collage practice extends this inquiry into material form. Through interdisciplinary processes, I print photographs onto inherited fabrics and intimate garments, including my own period underwear. These materials carry histories of touch and vulnerability, allowing images to exist as lived residue rather than distant representations. The body emerges as a vessel shaped by intergenerational memory, carrying experiences both visible and unseen. Acts of staining reflect how women carry, shed, and remake past selves, while menstruation becomes a cyclical marker of connection across time.

Tracing lineage through image and material, this project honors the women who came before me, those who stand beside me, and those still becoming. This work is my heart and an ongoing commitment, a practice I continually return to in search of ways photography can offer women light, space, and voice, particularly within a political climate that seeks to define and constrain our bodies and freedoms. Across portraits, landscapes, and objects, the work considers how identity emerges through relationships to family, land, and image, positioning photography not only as a means of preservation, but as an active participant in transformation.