“... Last year I had a very unusual experience.  I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream.  It was a small dream about time.”

-Annie Dillard

“Memory is archival as a collection of tangible and intangible artifacts that include our emotions in the context of history, culture, and intellect…Memory invokes the things that were and the things that are not.  Memory opposes history and embraces it with ordinary things and extraordinary artifacts.”

-Angelita Reyes

When I was a child my grandmother would tell me a story about the short, fat but beautiful Oma and the tall, handsome Opa.  The tall, handsome Opa fell in love with some mermaids and swam out to sea with them.  Eventually the mermaids left him and he cried for help.  The short, fat but beautiful Oma floated out to sea and saved the tall, handsome Opa and they lived happily ever after.  As I became an adult I learned that the story was really about my grandfather’s infidelity and my grandmother’s ability to keep her family together.

Through storytelling, memory is created, affirmed, and passed between people.  While memory is defined as retaining and recalling past experiences, the act of recollection is fluid.  Not all memories or stories are recalled perfectly.  It is here that my work begins, in a place where thoughts are patchy and stories are recreated.  The stories I tell are fragmented and reveal only a glimpse into the larger narrative.