“Flood Album”

“Flood Album” is a series of photograph-sized acrylic paintings. The process of making them is messy; I will paint, then scratch away or wipe with alcohol, and then paint over it again. Where I permanently take away parts of the images, I use Pearl Ex powder to change the texture of the painting. Sometimes I destroy the work 5 or 6 times before I paint the final image. All of the paintings are derived from my family photographs.

When I was young, we often lived at my grandmother’s house in the foothills of North Carolina. In this area the creeks flood, and so do the houses. Almost every summer my grandmother’s basement would flood, and we played roulette with what may get destroyed. My stepfather’s comic books, old family photographs, furniture or the old grand piano, what would be damaged this time? What would be unsalvageable? Where else could we keep our stuff?

All of the photographs I have painted preceded events which took a significant toll on my life or on the lives of those who raised me. These moments in time were marred in the minds of those who were there, and the faces you see have changed or are gone entirely. My hope is that those who have experienced intergenerational trauma, cycles of abuse, poverty, or cycles of addiction may feel a connection with my work, because these things are a part of my own experience. My paintings also seek to convey the bittersweet nostalgia of both reliving a happy memory from a photograph and reliving the grief which followed it, and how the levels of those feelings change over time. Loss is complicated, and messy, and it impacts everything which came before it, but that doesn’t mean there cannot be healing.