Past Lives began with the feeling that I had already lived several lives within one lifetime.

Created between 2023 and 2024, these digital collages emerged during my return to artistic practice, as I reflected on the versions of myself shaped by different hopes, experiences, disappointments, and possibilities. Some felt close enough to touch. Others had become unfamiliar, even though I still carried something of them.

I made these works by photographing my paintings, selecting fragments, and assembling them digitally into new compositions, which became archival prints. A passage that once belonged to a larger surface acquired a different presence beside another fragment. Parts were concealed; others remained visible. Each composition gave earlier work another life while retaining traces of where it began.

There is something tender in this process of taking apart and bringing together. It echoes the way I experience memory: a detail remains vivid while its surroundings grow indistinct. We carry gestures, feelings, and attachments forward, sometimes without recognizing their origins. What has passed continues to participate in who we are.

The geometric arrangements give these organic fragments a structure in which to be seen together. Looking at them now, I also imagine collections of traces assembled by someone or something in a future time, attempting to understand a life through what remains. What could these fragments reveal? What would remain inaccessible—the private feeling, the circumstances, the experience of having been that person?

The title Past Lives holds the possibility that we live many lives within one lifetime. Becoming can involve letting go of a self we once knew, while discovering how much of that self remains. I feel both tenderness and loss in looking back: an affection for who I was, and an awareness of what I could not recognize as precious while I was living it.

These works leave room for the viewer to consider their own earlier lives—the selves they miss, the ones they have outgrown, and those they are still coming to understand. I wonder whether we can look at who we are now with some of the tenderness we may one day feel in remembering.