Mis-Rememberings: Fragments of Longing and Love is my first collage work. It gave the questions I pursue their first shape: the story of Albertine, a woman I created from the fragments of others I’ve encountered through years of working with antique vernacular and archival photography.

This series recounts Albertine’s solitary return to the forested Champagne-Ardenne countryside in 1891 after falling in love in Paris. The bucolic scenes carry within them a sense of realization that the place she once believed safe had become what separated Albertine from her love. Each piece—an analog collage of two photos I shot on the grounds of Château d’Orquevaux in December 2024—creates one mis-remembering. I hand-treat each photograph with acrylic medium and gold before collaging them together as a gesture meant to materially and physically hold the weight of how time fragments memory and the story a woman tells herself of what her life had been. This is found in a texture or colour match. A path that folds into a river. Warped depth perception. Mirrors of light and colour. Through these, Albertine experiences her home altered by time and loss.

The stories of many real women find themselves in this state: fractured, mis-remembered, lost to the historical record. I created Albertine from the sparse details that remain of those women’s lives to give shape to how loss is experienced from a place of interiority. Mis-Rememberings: Fragments of Longing and Love doesn’t resolve this loss, it sits inside of it.