Recognitions is a mixed media collage series built from found photographs of women I have gathered during years of poring through stacks at flea markets, antique stores, and thrift shops.
It began as simply searching for interesting faces. These women arrived in my orbit separated from their names and their stories, lost in family memory, reduced to objects in boxes. I listened and the ones that seemed to recognize me ended up in my collection and collages. However, I could never bring myself to use the original photos in my work. I began the process of scanning them and developing my own archival system. As I spent more and more time searching for them, I started to understand this an act of rescuing them from disappearing entirely.
The series lives at the intersection of the personal and the historical — one woman moving through the world, drawn repeatedly to the faces of forgotten women, asking the question: what if recognition across time is actually recognition of myself in different forms, different lives?
Through these pieces, I am not identifying them or inventing their stories, but giving women lost to time ground to stand on again. I chose vellum as the primary substrate to allow her to never quite resolve into certainty, to continue to exist without explanation.
The naming convention deliberately refuses to name these women. Their anonymity is not a failure of information. It is the point. These are not portraits in the traditional sense. They are encounters with the self.
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