A home holds our family history, the deep roots of our identity hidden in our hopes, dreams and nightmares. As we build a home,  we infuse our surroundings with significance, blurring identity with environment. Rooted in my personal experience with Hurricane Katrina, this work explores the experience of imagining what had occurred within my own space that bore witness to the disaster as well as the resulting aftermath; connecting the mediated experience of disaster to the quiet personal reality of what comes next: memory. 

If a home is a history of its residents, then the space of a home is filled with memories grounded by the objects that trigger them.  With my work, I focus on details that trigger memories, traces of an experience that reside in recall.  The rooms are mostly vacant, yet they contain the stale leftovers of life. They resonate with dashed hope and beginnings that have definitely ended.  My interiors signify the memory that is held within the evidence; evidence that will eventually be altered, cleaned, sanitized, discarded - who knows? The photographs ground the viewer in this interior space, one that is fabricated from my memory; a revisiting of my own childhood. For me, fabrication is the catalyst for imagination to take over the space, to lift these photographs from mere documentation of an event to the realm of fantasy. By planting the seeds of a narrative that the viewer completes, my work participates in the idea of imperfect truth, emphasizing the distinction, or lack thereof, between what is real and what is fiction. If indeed the walls of a home both protect and protect against, then my work underlines the notion that, in our attempt to shield ourselves from the outside world, we may have created a false sense of safety that ultimately leaves us more vulnerable.

Kate Stewart Nicholson