Monotype, metal letterpress
Artist Statement
The artist’s book “Underlayers of Memory” was born from a question: “What remains when something disappears?” Fossils are physical evidence of what once lived; memories are the emotional substance. Both are fragments—partial, sometimes misleading—yet they are often all we have to reconstruct a larger narrative.
Think of fossils not as objects but as records of absence—memories the Earth keeps, while humans preserve memory through photographs. A fossil is to the Earth what a photograph is to the mind: a negative imprint of something no longer alive.
In “Underlayers of Memory”, I explore the intersection of natural history and my family’s story. I see the Earth’s body as landscape, its memory as sediment, and time as a force that compresses experience into forms both fragile and enduring. Through layering, ghost printing, and impression, I mirror how we remember, forget, and reconstruct meaning from fragments.
I draw inspiration from paleontology, black-and-white photography, natural objects, and poetry, using materials that mimic geologic processes. Sepia tones represent the clay and soil, movable metal type portrays the solid imprint of fossils, and translucent pages invite both discovery and disappearance. The primary printmaking medium in the book is monotype, which I see as a metaphor for uniqueness and illustrates that no memory is alike.
The book is not meant to be read in a conventional sense. It is meant to be excavated, interacted with, and perhaps even left partially unexplored. Like memory itself, parts of it may resist clarity, but still leave a meaningful impression.