This work features a family portrait from my mother’s childhood, transferred onto a corroded copper plate. The image shows my grandparents, my aunt, and my mother, with the corroded patina spreading like lakes seen from above, adding an abstract, topographical element to the piece. The emulsion lift technique creates a translucent effect, allowing parts of the image to fade into the copper, reflecting the fleeting nature of memory and the unpredictable process of remembering and forgetting. Inspired by artist June Clark’s musings on photography and memory, this piece invites the viewer to question whether the image is disappearing or revealing itself, encapsulating the duality of loss and revelation inherent in the act of remembering “Is the content in this photograph receding… or is it revealing itself?”

In this artwork, various archival images are transferred onto a corroded piece of copper, presenting three figures on a beach: a man drinking a beer, another lying on the sand, and a woman walking towards them. Each figure is drawn from separate photographs taken by my mother at different beaches throughout her youth. This piece, an early exploration into the style of traditional Mexican ex-votos, uses the copper’s natural tones to evoke the warmth of a sunny day, with the transfer allowing the material to bleed through the images and blur the boundaries between memory and imagination. Through my parents’ family photographs and anecdotes, I attempt to reconstruct a connection to these figures from my past, despite the physical and emotional distance created by years of separation. The work illustrates the fragility of memory—how recollections can be altered or lost over time, especially when filtered through the lens of familial storytelling and cultural dislocation.

Captured during a spontaneous visit to a flea market in Mexico City, this photograph has been transferred onto rusted sheets of corrugated steel, depicting a lively scene of shoppers engaging with artisans. The hasty composition, with its blurred upper half and sharply focused foreground, reflects the vibrant yet chaotic nature of such markets.  The vibrant colors have dulled slightly through the transfer onto the steel, lending the piece a sense of wear, age and foggy recollection.  Flea markets have become significant to my family’s visits to Mexico, offering a space to reclaim fragments of our heritage—objects that serve as tangible reminders of our roots once we return to Canada. Yet, as these cultural environments increasingly cater to tourists, I’ve come to realize that I, too, have become a visitor in my own homeland.  Exploring the intersection of nostalgia and belonging, I question what it means to engage with a cultural space as both an insider and an outsider.