This body of work entitled “Lives Long Past” brings together a series of assemblages that use transparencies in combination with text artifacts to create new narratives around personal memory. Beginning with found photographs of my own family, I was curious about the stories held in family albums from generations past, women I had never met but whose presence was still felt so vividly. From there I expanded to include other women, whose ghostly presences had such a powerful hold on my imagination. I rephotographed these faces, reframing them and then printing them on transparent film. Hovering above the vintage tin of their containers, they call to mind tintype photographs, reflecting and floating above the background. The text that is also a part of these assemblages, includes words from my own poems, sometimes a stanza in its entirety, sometimes a fragment, sometimes just the suggestion of a word or phrase. In each instance the words are reimagined, reprinted on silk, enclosed in handcrafted folios, or layered on the tin itself. Presented together with the images, and enclosed in the tin containers, new stories are suggested as the viewer considers the connection between the text and image intimated in the juxtaposition.