Château d'Orquevaux Artists & Writers Residency (June 2026, Orquevaux, France)

selected artist, collage

During my residency at Château d'Orquevaux, I worked primarily with vintage photography magazines, newspapers, printed film photographs, and found materials collected over many years. Rather than arriving with a predetermined concept, I began by cutting, sorting, and organizing these materials, allowing patterns and themes to emerge naturally through the process. Images of people, animals, nature, windows, and doors repeatedly surfaced, guiding the direction of the work and revealing connections I had not anticipated before arriving.

The resulting body of work developed into three interconnected series exploring identity, perception, and transition. Drawing from both black-and-white and color photography, I investigated the ways images shape our understanding of reality and memory. Windows became a framework for examining perspective and the relationship between interior and exterior worlds, while doors served as symbols of thresholds, passage, and transformation. Throughout the work, fragments of the original source material were cut into strips, layered, and reassembled, creating compositions that balance destruction and preservation.

This residency marked a significant moment in my artistic development. It provided the time and space to closely observe my own creative process and to embrace a more intuitive approach to making. I challenged myself to move beyond the minimalism that has characterized much of my previous work, instead filling each composition with layered imagery, texture, and visual complexity. The experience deepened my understanding of how ideas emerge through making and reinforced my interest in collage as a tool for exploring memory, emotion, and perceived reality.