In the past year, I have lost my childhood dog, Coltrane, and both of my grandfathers, Ken and Lonnie, just a month apart. These losses have marked the transition from childhood to adulthood, from places that once felt permanent to spaces now defined by absence. I have lost not only the people who shaped me but also the places that once held significance—my childhood home, the rituals that once felt routine, and the landscapes that defined my youth. Death had not touched my family in this way before, and yet, in such a short time, it arrived all at once.

Much of this work focuses on my grandfather Ken, who passed in late January after being admitted to hospice care. My grandparents lived in the same house in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for 53 years. Though my relationship with my grandmother has always been difficult, I have always felt close to him. The photographs in this project exist on either side of his passing—some taken in November, in his final months, and others shortly after his death. These images have shifted in meaning with time, reminding me of how grief changes the way we see and remember. The spaces he once occupied now feel unfamiliar, holding a presence that is both there and not. I am interested in how grief lingers, not just in memory, but in the physical spaces left behind.

This project extends beyond the loss of a person—it is about the loss of place. My childhood dog, Coltrane, passed in March of 2024, and I took images both before and after his death in landscapes that were already in transition, knowing they would soon feel even more distant. The spaces that once grounded me have become unrecognizable, and with them, I feel an increasing distance from the person I once was. My work has always explored the relationships people have with their environments, how memory embeds itself in place, and how absence defines presence. I am drawn to what exists in the in-between—the tension between isolation and connection, past and present, what is seen and what is forgotten.