The Seven Stages
The Seven Stages is an ongoing photographic elegy unfolding in reverse—from the final silence of self to the first glimmer of identity. In this deeply personal series, the artist traces the stages of Alzheimer’s disease through her grandmother’s decline, and in doing so, contemplates her own genetic tether to her own inevitable decline.
Working across analog formats—Polaroid, 35mm, 4×5, and pinhole—she composes each image like a stanza. Light becomes metaphor, blur mimics the progressive fade of memory, and composition becomes lamentation. A glowing face erased from a portrait, mismatched socks in a blur of motion, jewelry placed carefully in the dishwasher—each frame speaks to the surreal intimacy of cognitive unraveling.
The artist steps into her grandmother’s memoryscape through self-portraiture, embodying her gestures and silences. Her body becomes a vessel—between witness and participant, present and past. These photographs do not aim to document illness, but to hold space for the soft, poetic collapse of identity that Alzheimer’s brings.
This is not a fixed narrative, but a progression of emotional time. The project moves in reverse—toward clarity, toward origin. The final image, Inheritance, is a soft-focus recreation of a portrait taken at the beginning of her grandmother’s life. Only a hairpin remains sharply defined, the rest dissolving gently, like memory resisting permanence.
The Seven Stages invites viewers to reflect on what lingers when memory recedes—how gesture, ritual, and light can preserve what the mind releases. As the series evolves, it continues to search for the visual language of loss, grace, and the invisible architecture of remembering.
This is not just a story about illness—it is a meditation on lineage, transformation, and the quiet echoes of who we once were, before memory knew how to let go.
Working across analog formats—Polaroid, 35mm, 4×5, and pinhole—she composes each image like a stanza. Light becomes metaphor, blur mimics the progressive fade of memory, and composition becomes lamentation. A glowing face erased from a portrait, mismatched socks in a blur of motion, jewelry placed carefully in the dishwasher—each frame speaks to the surreal intimacy of cognitive unraveling.
The artist steps into her grandmother’s memoryscape through self-portraiture, embodying her gestures and silences. Her body becomes a vessel—between witness and participant, present and past. These photographs do not aim to document illness, but to hold space for the soft, poetic collapse of identity that Alzheimer’s brings.
This is not a fixed narrative, but a progression of emotional time. The project moves in reverse—toward clarity, toward origin. The final image, Inheritance, is a soft-focus recreation of a portrait taken at the beginning of her grandmother’s life. Only a hairpin remains sharply defined, the rest dissolving gently, like memory resisting permanence.
The Seven Stages invites viewers to reflect on what lingers when memory recedes—how gesture, ritual, and light can preserve what the mind releases. As the series evolves, it continues to search for the visual language of loss, grace, and the invisible architecture of remembering.
This is not just a story about illness—it is a meditation on lineage, transformation, and the quiet echoes of who we once were, before memory knew how to let go.