Lineage of Music traces how music, nature, and family intertwined through my evolving practice in photography. As a child, I was devoted to the violin and played for eight years; that early musical training later informed the way I approached photographic experimentation.
My interest in historical processes led me to cyanotype. Wanting to move beyond paper, I began printing directly onto three damaged violins, embracing the unknown qualities of their aged wood. I drew on two traditional uses of cyanotype—botanical documentation and inexpensive family photo reproduction—as a framework for thinking about memory, lineage, and the passage of time
Over one winter, I revisited my family’s photographic archives. My grandmother obsessively documented her plants and garden, while my uncle once ran a photography studio and now works through his wildlife-focused business, Sharp Shot Nature. My own practice also began with nature, and this shared subject created a thread across generations.
From our three archives, I created individual collages for my grandmother, my uncle, and myself. Each person’s photographs appears on the front of a violin, while the backs carry an extended frame: a cyanotype landscape of Pelican Lake, the site of our family cabin, and a place that connects us. The violins function as both instruments and vessels, suggesting how a love of nature and image-making is passed down, like an instrument handed from student to student.
The condition of the violins and the clarity of the images together mark time. On my grandmother’s violin, the images are fragmented, echoing her departure from photography and the instrument’s lack of strings. My uncle’s and my own photographs become progressively clearer, mirrored by the more intact state of the later violins. I intentionally omitted the bows to signal the silencing of the instrument since I no longer play. Cracks, missing pieces, and surface flaws give each violin its own presence. Like the family members they represent, each one carries a distinct and layered story.