The Lost Landscapes
2025
Almost 20 years ago I was working on experimental layered photomontage work not that dissimilar from the work I am creating now. Though my skills were not as honed back then, the concepts were sound. In 2006 I created a series called The Lost Landscapes in which I layered and pieced together fragments of my landscape photographs from different places around the world to create completely fictional places that exist only in the memory of my imagination.
Twenty years later, I am working now with a reprise of that old series using my original photographs I shot long ago layered with paper collage elements to represent the fragility of life and the passage of time in each wrinkled torn page. It is a collaboration with the woman I was - younger, more hopeful and more naive. I truly believed in the inherent goodness of humanity then and that anything was possible in a benevolent world. My son was a toddler and I was newly pregnant with twins. I saw joy and magic in everything. Little did I know that later that year tragedy would strike and I would lose one of my twin daughters, leaving me with such a deep psychic wound that I would not recover my creativity for over a decade and a half.
The landscapes I once inhabited, both real and imagined were lost to me and the door to the many realms of my creative expression locked against me. Joy became a foreign land.
In this new work, I go looking to find the scattered shards of myself still lost in these other dimensions, hoping to repair and integrate the past with the present. I'll never recover a certain innocence, but I do think there's still a chance at finding something worth the rescue mission.
There are no maps to these lost continents, but it is critical that I be whole again to face this next chapter of my life at this critical time in history.
