The fifth wall of my solo show, The Distance of Forgetting at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon.

The Distance of Forgetting is a body of work that I began in 2018 on a trip to Prague and Budapest. It is a series of collaged, alt-process self-portraits that aren’t really self-portraits and were all handmade by me in my basement darkroom. The motivation behind these exploring the experiences of being a woman in the world today and of the required distance from one’s own life in order to be able to see it from a new perspective that allows for the possibility of creative freedom. They are meant to capture not just a moment in time, but rather to evoke an emotional response in the viewer and a sense of being in these reconstructed places in time and space.
The historical/alternative/analog photo processes used for these prints are platinum/palladium, gum bichromate, cyanotype and polymer photogravure. All of these processes rely on light sensitive emulsions that I handcoat onto printmaking paper (similar in some ways to watercolor paper). The first three processes I mentioned have been in use for 150 years or more. Polymer photogravure is a slightly modernized version of an old etching process where the metal etching plates are coated in a polymer that is the layer that gets etched away, allowing the plate to hold ink which is then transferred to the paper when it is run through a photogravure press. For more videos on all these processes and more peeks into my darkroom, please subscribe to my channel and click the bell to receive a notification when I've posted a new video.