Lacan’s concept of the “Quilting Point” sees the suturing of meaning onto memory through its awkward and authoritarian association with the symbolic order of words, culture, and history. When and where too few points of association are established, as within the experience of trauma or neglect, psychosis and neurosis emerge. In this work, I am seeking to explore the personal and political dimensions of my own fraying fabric. Through the use of Image Text, the combining of short essays and poems with image pairings, I produce triptychs that seek to shape and suture meaning to the memories they signify. 

Within each, I explore questions of intimacy, the nature of photography, queer and trans identity, trauma, paranoia, and the divine/spiritual. I produce prints from negatives exhumed from my archive taken over the course of my gender transition. The images reflect shifting relationships with family, friends, and others as they seek to resuture their understanding of me through transition. I reproduce these images as fully analog prints in a color darkroom, seeking as much as possible to isolate myself from the discursive flow of the digitized spectacle. Responding to photographic pairings in associative and free-flowing texts, I then print analog photograms of the resulting essays onto the same photochemical paper to which the images are affixed, reducing both text and image to the status of the other. 

This work is still in progress, and there are many active questions that require resolution.