Recovery takes many forms:

It is personal, shared, specific, temporal, ongoing, cyclical, painful, powerful, corny, vague,unsettling, unearthing, uprooting

It is endless, effort, investigating, confronting, confessing, gorgeous, curious, surprising,rewarding, renewing,

It is fragile like a piece of stained glass. It is revealing like an X-ray. It is picking up the pieces and composing anew.  

It is layered like a collage or a bed of soil. Gardening feels like a collage. Gardening feels like recovery.

Gardening takes many forms:

It is sowing, planting, fixing, placing, maintaining - all acts of composition.

Working as a gardener I recovered:

A pocket watch, a peach pit, a lightbulb, hair clips, a marble, a knot, a fake flower, a die, a toy dinosaur, a mirror.

Through collage interventions, these works trace layers of maternal relationships. They unfurl the album and stretch the horizon, facing the beauty and complexity of intergenerational exchange.

The imagery in these collages comes from an incidental archive of photo-clippings gathered by my mother’s mother, Mary Jane Christakos. She collected and organized imagery from magazines to use as teaching tools at her art store in Sudbury, ON.

I consider what is passed down, what is left behind, and what to make of it. These reference photographs have become both material and subject matter. Working with found images is an act of both preservation and re-presentation. I fall within the folds of this archive, treating it as both a site of inheritance and a generative space.