c. 1864

Through the Recognitions series, I am not identifying the women or inventing their stories, but giving those lost to time ground to stand on again. I chose vellum as the primary substrate to allow her to never quite resolve into certainty, to continue to exist without explanation. The naming convention deliberately refuses to name these women. Their anonymity is not a failure of information. It is the point. These are not portraits in the traditional sense. They are encounters with the self. In c. 1864, I reconstructed the portrait of a young woman from the middle of the 19th century found again 170 years later in a bin in Vancouver, Canada.