Mis-Rememberings: Fragments of Longing and Love is my first collage work. It gave the questions I pursue their first shape: the story of Albertine, a woman I created from the fragments of others I’ve encountered through years of working with antique vernacular and archival photography.
This series recounts Albertine’s solitary return to the forested Champagne-Ardenne countryside in 1891 after falling in love in Paris. The bucolic scenes carry within them a sense of realization that the place she once believed safe had become what separated Albertine from her love. Each piece—an analog collage of two photos I shot on the grounds of Château d’Orquevaux in December 2024—creates one mis-remembering. I hand-treat each photograph with acrylic medium and gold before collaging them together as a gesture meant to materially and physically hold the weight of how time fragments memory and the story a woman tells herself of what her life had been. This is found in a texture or colour match. A path that folds into a river. Warped depth perception. Mirrors of light and colour. Through these, Albertine experiences her home altered by time and loss. I drew inspiration for the story told through these pieces from French symbolists such as Moreau and de Chevannes as well as French storytellers of the era including Proust and de Maupassant.
The stories of many real women find themselves in this state: fractured, mis-remembered, lost to the historical record. I created Albertine from the sparse details that remain of those women’s lives to give shape to how loss is experienced from a place of interiority. Mis-Rememberings: Fragments of Longing and Love doesn’t resolve this loss, it sits inside of it.
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