Coming Home
“Coming Home” is a photo journal series documenting the dissonant aftermath of returning to a childhood landscape that no longer feels like home. Created after my abortion in Texas, these images capture the quiet, persistent ache of seeking refuge and finding only echoes.
Upon arriving back at my mother's house in the small Canadian town where I grew up, I had hoped for relief, for safety, for a softer place to land. Instead, I encountered an uneasy familiarity — a place steeped in memory, layered with unresolved pain. The streets, the fields, the empty corners of small-town life seemed to amplify old wounds rather than soothe them.
In this series, I explore the concept of "home" not as a physical location, but as a fragile, shifting internal state. I photograph the ordinary and the overlooked: the weathered porches, the empty lots, the mundane relics of everyday life. Each frame is a conversation between past and present selves — a visual reckoning with the ghosts that linger in familiar places.
Coming Home captures the particular loneliness of returning to a place that no longer fits, of being a changed person in an unchanged landscape. The work resists neat resolutions or redemptive endings. Healing here is not triumphant; it is uncomfortable, circuitous, and often silent.
The series extends the themes present throughout my broader body of work: the interplay between body and environment, the tension between visibility and invisibility, and the nonlinear, often contradictory nature of recovery. It reflects my ongoing interest in using photography as a means of mapping emotional states onto physical spaces — grounding invisible interior experiences within tangible, recognizable settings.
Ultimately, Coming Home asks:
What happens when the places meant to heal us also hurt us?
Where do we find ourselves when nowhere feels like home?
And perhaps most importantly:
Can we make a home inside ourselves when the external world fails to offer one?
