My work in general, has been about family, memory, and placing myself in a timeline of generations. I have depicted the patterns and rhythms of family lands to search for and reflect on the traces of my ancestors’ presence. The work acts as a recollection, and evokes my sense of longing for and belonging to a place.

The monoprints on this website are based on a trip to Poland in June 2009. I travelled to the former lands of my ancestors who lived along the Vistula River from the 1500’s to the1880’s. My goal was to draw this landscape, to record this almost legendary place I had heard about throughout my life, and to create work based on my experience. I didn’t know what I would see, or if I would connect with this region at all, but the trip turned out to be an unexpected revelation for me.

The prints seen here are built up in layers of ink and color, stacking visual information from different sources. Sometimes woodblocks are layered with trace monotype, sometimes the compositions are open, and sometimes they are dark, dense and more thickly layered. The images reveal and obscure places, mimicking the act of remembering in which the brain selects certain images and hides others.