You Were Young and So Was I (2025)

You Were Young and So Was I is a body of work that emerged from the artist’s personal experience of loss, evolution of consciousness, and connection with strangers. These works developed over a year of meeting, interviewing, and photographing people in the process of grieving, with the intention of bringing their stories into a physical, affirming form. They contain memory, objects that carry the touch of lost loved ones, gestures that honor each participant’s experience, and environments significant in their grief. Working in and around the documentary tradition of photography, the artist approaches the image as both evidence of connection and arranged offering, choosing intimacy over objectivity. Rather than records of grief, they are meditations where absence, presence, and memory coexist.  

Grief is often misunderstood and concealed in the culture of the United States. It is often overpowered by isolation and the medicalization of death. These works invite viewers to bring their personal histories to the image and to consider how loss has shaped their perception. Rather than offering a resolution to complex feelings of bereavement, this project provides the opportunity to look upon lived experience with radical self-compassion. 

Printed on bronze sheet metal, the images become conductors of consciousness, transforming the work into a vibrational source of dialogue between viewers, project participants, and the artist. Containing 90% copper, the material is extremely sensitive to temperature changes and second only to silver, it is the most electrically conductive metal. As viewers engage with the work, their bodily warmth and thoughts—both conscious and unconscious—pass through and are remembered by these charged surfaces. The material will patina in unexpected ways as time goes on. This work is meant to evolve as more contact is made, just as the internal cavern left by loss can become a well of depth through compassionate introspection and connection.

UV print, bronze alloy 220, polyurethane, artist’s sebum

30”x24” vertical and 24”x30” landscape