ORIGIN
ORIGIN is a body of photographic work developed during my 2026 Guest Artist residency at Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory. Grounded in more than four decades of artistic practice, the nineteen works bring photography into dialogue with scientific instrumentation, particle interaction imagery, and the history of optical technologies.
The project began with photographs of Fermilab's laboratories, accelerator systems, and scientific apparatus. Through an extensive process of photographic analysis and digital construction, she isolated machinery from its industrial surroundings, reconstructed obscured sections using her own photographs of the same equipment, and transformed the visual presentation of the structures through light, shadow, color, and perspective. Actual particle interaction imagery taken from experimental readouts viewed on screens at Fermilab was incorporated into these compositions. The selection, scale, placement, and visual relationships of this scientific imagery are the artist's own.
Rather than documenting scientific equipment or illustrating scientific concepts, ORIGIN creates a photographic interpretation of the relationship between physical instruments and the evidence they make accessible. The scientific imagery retains its origin in experimental research, while its placement within each photograph establishes new visual and conceptual relationships. The resulting images bring together two distinct ways of investigating the world: scientific measurement and photographic interpretation.
Photography has long been connected to the development of instruments that extend human vision, from the camera obscura and early photographic processes to contemporary detectors and astronomical cameras. In ORIGIN, this history becomes a way of considering how images are produced, how evidence is made visible, and how we understand phenomena beyond ordinary perception.
The title refers to the origins of the universe and the fundamental nature of matter, but also to the beginning of an image as evidence: an event leaves a trace, the trace becomes an image, and the image becomes a means of understanding.
ORIGIN occupies the space between what can be seen and what must be inferred, between the physical instrument and the image it produces, and between scientific observation and the possibilities of photography.
We do not see the invisible; we know it through what it leaves behind.