My work begins with the feeling that no one we have loved is ever truly gone, and that the things they touched still carry something of them. There is an energy that lingers in photographs, in fabric, in objects, in places, and I feel drawn to it, as though it is still there.

I return often, in memory, to the breakfast nook on Melmore Street, where my grandfather first taught me how to draw. It was a simple, everyday place, but it shaped the way I learned to see. What I received there went beyond drawing. It was about attention, about care, about the feeling of being in an environment that shaped how I learned to see as an artist. That feeling has stayed with me, and in some ways, the space itself has too.

The figures in my work come from vintage photographs whose names and histories have been lost, yet they do not feel gone. They feel suspended, held somewhere between then and now. I am drawn to the quiet, private moments they contain, the expressions and gestures that suggest an inner life just beyond reach. When I begin a piece, I am not trying to recreate them, but to listen. To allow what remains - memory, emotion, and energy - to emerge in a new form.

The act of making, for me, is a kind of collaboration. The materials, the image, the past, and something less visible all meet in the same place. I do not feel that I am inventing so much as receiving, allowing myself to make room for these fragments to gather, shift, and take on new life.

I believe deeply that everything is connected. The past is not separate from the present. The seen is not separate from the unseen. What has been forgotten is not gone, it is simply waiting for recognition.

I make this work because I feel called to participate in that recognition. To honor what remains. To give form to what cannot quite be spoken. And to offer something another person can step into and feel, the sense that we are all part of something continuous, something held, something still unfolding.