Zine / Artist's Statement

This project occupied me for years, beginning when I ran away and ended up in LA for a month, where lots of first dates occurred. I found myself back there a year later, experiencing flashbacks as I returned to various places around the city. I had been gifted a camera and decided to retroactively document the origins of these flashbacks, as most of my memories appear to me. I had never used a film camera before. 

Concerned with being fully involved in every step of the process, deciding to make the paper allowed me to cultivate sentimentality as I was able to mix ephemera into the pulp itself, glitter, the handwritten drafts of poems, incense ash, packaging from a tin of fish, roses collected from the ground, I imagine to be forgetting some. my goal was to create a reminiscent potion to serve as the base for a piece dependent upon sentimentality. The ink was made of raspberries, I added liquid iron to serve as an homage to my own anemia and wrote the majority out with an eyeliner brush. Embroidery as a means of fastening over glue felt more personally derived than using artificial glue. 

I decided to use the negatives instead of the photos themselves as I felt it was more apt to my memory than the literal space I shared with these men. They exist to me best in retrospect.

Photos Below