My father, and his mother before him, loved the ocean. My dad was the only person I've ever known to bodysurf the waves, sans board. My grandmother swam every day, a slow, methodical freestyle that left one puzzled as to how she stayed afloat.

I photographed my father in his last months to mark the moments we had left, to try to stop time. With my camera I could make the oppressive sadness feel meaningful, somehow. I could try to control our sliver of reality, which was narrowing with every passing day.

In the aftermath of my father’s passing from cancer, I watch for light along the coast; my dad always said he could tell the time of day in my mother's paintings of the Maine shoreline. I open myself to moments when memories of him alight, and time seems to expand—some mysterious place where the cosmos is felt. I explore opacity and light, layer and surface as metaphors for the unknown and the fallibility of memory. In my recent installation at MassArt x SoWa Gallery, I project the images onto semi-translucent fabric, seeking to evoke the fragility of existence through a slowly transitioning sequence. No picture remains for long before it gives way to another image, echoing life’s impermanence.

Through these photographic meditations, I hold my dad’s memory close, striving to accept what is gone, and that which I cannot know, with peace.