Reclaimed Roots grew out of my fascination with what endures, with how memory, land, and legacy remain connected even after their physical ties have been severed. The series began as a meditation on loss, but it evolved into something more hopeful: an act of reclamation. It asks what we can still hold when what once defined us — our homes, our histories, our ground, has been burned, forgotten, or taken away.

I work with materials that carry their own memories. Charcoal from the weeping willow, ash from fallen timbers, powdered graphite, and Sumi ink brewed from pine soot and moss are the foundation of this series. They are not chosen for beauty, but for meaning. Charcoal embodies grief; ash contains the remains of shelter; graphite reflects the precision of record and ownership; Sumi ink, drawn from soot and living moss, holds the quiet promise of renewal. Each mark made with them is both gesture and testimony, a way of transforming what was consumed into something living again.

As I created these works, people began to return. Figures surfaced from layers of soot and graphite, inspired by tintype photographs, those haunting silver portraits that once held the faces of families bound to the land. I let them emerge slowly, like memory rising from shadow. They are not ghosts, but witnesses, ancestors and strangers alike, reminding us that what we inherit is not property, but presence.

Each piece in Reclaimed Roots is fragile yet enduring, its surface breathing with the rhythm of what remains. The work is about reverence, for what has survived, and for what still speaks from the ashes. For me, these archival drawings are not elegies for the past but quiet affirmations of resilience. They honor the idea that even when the ground shifts beneath us, something human, something sacred, still takes root.