I make painted paper collages of Virginia’s historic house museums. I’m drawn to their artifice: to hold onto the past, we have to imagine it, and these rooms make that imagining visible. Once lived in, they are now composed, interpreted, and performed as history.

Raised Catholic in Florida, I grew up around architecture designed to produce belief through ritual and arrangement. Before moving to Virginia, the only house museums I had visited were Henry Flagler’s and Ernest Hemingway’s, experienced more as tourist attractions than immersive historical spaces. When I encountered Monticello, Colonial Williamsburg, and countless others, I recognized a familiar impulse rather than inherited reverence: build a convincing room and invite people to believe it. Rather than seeing that as a flaw, I’m interested in the creative and interpretive work these spaces perform.

Collage feels uniquely suited to this subject. Like a curator restoring a room or filling gaps in an incomplete historical record, I edit, rearrange, and reconstruct. Through invented color, compressed perspective, and painted paper, I preserve each room’s recognizable structure while extending the interpretive work already embedded within it.