ARTIST STATEMENT

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Waiting Rooms comes from a deeply personal place. In 2016, my daughter almost died. We spent seven days in the ICU, and that experience changed the way I understand time, fear, and the spaces we are forced to occupy when someone we love is in danger. Since then, as my parents have aged, I have also found myself in what is often called the “sandwich generation,” still helping my young adult children while also helping my aging parents. Many of the photographs in this exhibition come from situations in which my husband and I have had to take on the caregiver role our parents once held.

 

The photographs in this exhibition begin in 2016 and continue through this year, tracing a path through my life as I have continued to wait, worry, and return to medical spaces over and over again. For me, waiting rooms are not just physical places. They are spaces of uncertainty, places where time slows down and distraction becomes part of survival. You are there for a reason, but you are also suspended from that reason, waiting to find out what happens next. I have also watched how much of this experience goes unspoken, even as we do our best to distract ourselves, stay busy, and not think too hard about what might come next.

 

My work has long been connected to the things we hide, avoid, and abandon. I am interested in using my voice to look closely at what is often overlooked or left behind, especially the emotional terrain we are expected to carry quietly. Photography has become one way for me to process stress and make sense of what I am living through. It gives form to memory, fear, grief, and endurance. It lets me hold onto moments that might otherwise disappear.

 

Waiting Rooms is both personal and shared. It begins in my own life, but it reaches toward a wider experience of waiting, caregiving, uncertainty, and love. This body of work is my way of making space for those realities, and of asking us to look at what happens in the rooms where we wait for answers.