Growing up I listened and learned of the complicated history my grandparents endured throughout their internment as Japanese Canadians in the Second World War and in the years after. I took in the stories and the images and as the years went by I began to research and attempt to understand all that I could. Continually drawn back to this complicated family narrative, I have sought to explore through my work, the relationships and interactions between the sites where these stories occurred and the memories themselves. Investigating the photographic records I have inherited and the conflated memories they have come to represent, moments are recreated and a landscape is revisited; yet nothing is exactly as it was. The boundaries between truth and fiction have become too blurred. Instead, a cycle, a loop of memory work has been set in motion, in which the layers of meaning and the alternate readings of events, can be seen in the fractured and obviously constructed elements of the works. Traces of memory can be found, links to forgotten places are established, while voids and absences investigate the fragments and silences of what has been left unsaid or forgotten.
At times tenuous and in other moments concrete, a seemingly continuous horizon line runs throughout the work, connecting one piece to the next, laying the foundation for a landscape that has witnessed much, but changed very little. Offering a shifting sense of grounding, the line also separates and divides, highlighting the desire to locate memory, as well as the importance of letting it slip away. For at times the need to forget can be just as important as the need to remember.
