Currently in Production

Project Statement

A History of Vanishing is a photographic investigation into the erasures and silences that define one

family’s history—my own. At its heart is my mother’s dementia, which has stripped away her

memory but also revealed the lifelong practice of selective forgetting that shaped my childhood.

Through intimate portraits, still life, and forensic-style staged reconstructions, I explore the unstable

territory where memory, trauma, and truth intersect.

Dementia is often framed as an inevitable medical decline, but in my family, forgetting began long

before illness. My mother once chose what not to remember—particularly the domestic abuse that

shadowed our lives. Now, as dementia advances, that voluntary erasure has become permanent. Her

memory loss is both illness and metaphor: a final act of vanishing that closes the door on truths she

once refused to speak.

This project is deeply personal. After my father’s sudden death, the official verdict—a heart attack

—was complicated by unexplained bruises, a bloodstained room, and a coroner’s report that raised

more questions than it answered. I was left to clean the scene, but not to ask questions. My mother

said she didn’t remember. She once joked that she had studied how to commit the perfect crime.

Whether her memory lapses then were deliberate or not, I will never know.

A History of Vanishing is my attempt to confront these silences before they disappear entirely. It

moves between family archives and constructed imagery, between fact and metaphor. Some

photographs are rooted in evidence—heirlooms, documents, the marks left on skin. Others are

staged reconstructions: fragments of rooms, shadowed gestures, and landscapes where memory

falters. The series asks: what does the body remember when the mind refuses? What remains when

memory has vanished?

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