Inherited Light began with my father's manipulated SX-70 Polaroid photographs. Using dental tools, he worked into the surface of the developing images, transforming photographs into painterly compositions. Years later, I found myself returning to his work, not to recreate it, but to begin a conversation between his way of seeing and my own.

I use cyanotype as the photographic foundation for the series, working with botanicals and alternative solutions to create images shaped partly by intention and partly by unpredictability. Each cyanotype is created at 4.25 x 3.5 inches, referencing the familiar proportions of his Polaroids while allowing a very different photographic process to emerge.

Layers of encaustic and mixed media further alter the cyanotypes, obscuring, revealing, and transforming the original image. This process echoes the physical manipulation central to my father's photographs while remaining rooted in my own practice of layering and discovery. Traces of the original image remain, but what emerges is something new.

Inherited Light is an exploration of artistic inheritance, memory, and the ways ideas can travel between generations. My father's work becomes a point of departure rather than something to reproduce. Through materials and processes separated by time, his photographs and my own work enter into a continuing dialogue about what we inherit, what we transform, and what we make our own.