Life, Extended reflects on what it means to grow up in a family shaped by military structure and movement. As a military child, my understanding of home was never entirely fixed to place; it was assembled from ritual, discipline, distance, and the quiet resilience of those who remain. And yet, I was raised in Appalachia—a region whose layered histories, landscapes, and domestic traditions continue to shape how I see and tell stories.

Working across painting, film, and installation, I return to memory as something both inherited and reinterpreted. The Life Story series draws from family archives, military postcards, and familiar interiors to consider how identity forms within systems larger than ourselves. Everyday objects—kitchen tables, toys, glassware, postcards, doorways—shift in meaning. In the act of remembering, the ordinary is elevated to evidence and artifact. What steadies me as a keepsake, when placed in public view, becomes an invitation—to witness, to recognize, to recall something of one’s own.

The title Life, Extended speaks to duration—extended time, extended distance, extended sacrifice—but also to rupture and renewal. There have been moments when life felt fractured or suspended, when identity had to be rebuilt from what remained. Extension, then, is not simply lengthening; it is continuation. It is the quiet act of beginning again.

These works function not as fixed recollections but as living documents—images that evolve as they are revisited and re-understood. Across all mediums, I approach storytelling as a form of witnessing, attentive to how personal memory intersects with broader histories—particularly within Appalachia, where land, service, labor, and lineage are deeply intertwined. Life, Extended invites viewers to consider what is carried across time and terrain, what is inherited without instruction, and how the most familiar objects can quietly hold the weight of history.