After Hymn
After Hymn is a photographic project that operates at the intersection of archive, memory, and material transformation. Composed of 4 by 5 inch wet plate collodion tintypes on aluminum plates, the work draws from two primary sources: an inherited archive of photographs taken by the artist’s father between 1980 and 1999, and a series of contemporary images produced in response. Together, these bodies of work establish a dialogue that unfolds across time, geography, and authorship. The father’s photographs — rooted in the rural landscapes of South and North Carolina— reflect a life shaped by a deep affinity for the natural world. As a naturalist, hunter, and amateur photographer, his practice was grounded in direct engagement with the environment. Revisiting this archive allows the artist to re-enter his field of vision, reactivating a gaze that is at once intimate and mediated by absence. Through this process, the archive becomes less a static repository than a living structure —one that invites reinterpretation and emotional reconstruction. In parallel, the artist’s own photographs, produced in southern Spain on land tied to her maternal lineage, introduce a second geography into the work. This duality reflects a bi-cultural identity formed between two territories that were never fully shared in lived experience. The resulting images extend the dialogue beyond inheritance, positioning landscape as both a site of memory and a framework for negotiating belonging.
Central to the project is the use of the wet plate collodion process. By scanning and rephotographing the father’s images with a large-format 4×5 in camera, the artist collapses temporal distance, bringing together three distinct moments: the father’s original act of seeing, the artist’s contemporary intervention, and a 19th-century photographic technique. This convergence produces objects that are materially and conceptually dense, functioning simultaneously as relics and rearticulations. The slowness and tactility of the collodion process stand in deliberate contrast to the speed and reproducibility of digital imagery. Each tintype is unique, reinforcing the singularity of both memory and encounter. In this context, the photographic object becomes a site where mourning is not only represented but materially embedded. A key image within the project —a photograph of a stranded shark originally taken by the father— has been appropriated and reinterpreted through this process, serving as a conceptual anchor. It encapsulates themes of displacement, vulnerability, and ecological tension that resonate throughout the work. Rather than approaching the past through nostalgia, After Hymn positions return as a transformative act. By recontextualizing the archive through a contemporary ecological lens, the work engages with broader concerns surrounding environmental fragility, climate change, and the ethics of care.
Personal grief becomes intertwined with collective crisis, situating the project within a wider discourse on humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Ultimately, the work reflects on how identity is constructed through inheritance —both cultural and emotional— and how belonging may persist beyond death through acts of reinterpretation, translation, and material engagement. It occupies a threshold where past and present converge, where image-making becomes a means of both remembrance and reconfiguration. All works presented are wet plate collodion tintypes produced by the artist. Some are based on photographs originally taken by her father, while others derive from her own images; to indicate this distinction, the labels “Hymn”, for the artist’s father, and “I”, for the artist, appear beneath each work, referring solely to the authorship of the source photograph, not to the making of the collodion itself.
