I am the repository for my family archives going back to the late 1800s, not just photographs but books and magazines, recipe books, letters, documents, greeting cards, jewelry, games, kitchen gadgets, and assorted ephemera. I consider these “found” objects because I didn’t create them or buy them, and now I incorporate them in collage, montage, and assemblage.

What Lies Within - Using my old papers and family photographs to suggest what was missing, ambiguous, or just “off” in my life’s story in a way others may relate to in their own.

Double Entendre — Having a little fun combining my grandmother’s collection of recipe booklets with photos of family members to tell “suggestive” stories:

Assemblage or 3-D Collage: Vintage photos and ephemera as collapsible collage:

Photomontage — My mom and dad and their best drinking buddies, using scrapbook pages and a vintage cocktail recipe book and addendum:

I Like Ike — The bland, almost featureless characters depicted on the box of one of my favorite childhood toys, Krazy Ikes, have skinny, spindly legs and knobby knees. Just like me when I was a kid. That gave me an idea. I created three small, tall booklets. Each booklet contains ten pages I filled with phrases, each containing the word “leg” — coded messages from the past.

Digital Collage (from vintage seed packets) — 1) Ethel (my grandmother, “Gaga”) at the 1943 World’s Fair; 2) Aunt Blanche, an avid gardener, on her front stoop; 3) Three Gals in Hawaii (Gaga and Pals) using a souvenir “newspaper” photo from that trip