Prompted by encounters with archival images and personal memory, this project reflects on how domestic spaces come to embody and complicate cultural systems of value. While at the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan, I handled many images depicting domestic prairie life, attributing meaning to them as I associated them with my personal history. Archival images often frame domesticity as an idealized site of women’s duty, reinforcing stereotypical gendered narratives. Despite this overt framing, one of my favourite images from the collection is a portrait of Mrs. Alva Boreen, described as the wife of Honourable Edgar Kaeding, Minister of the Department of Agriculture. It’s 1975. Alva beams brightly beside her tomatoes, prepped for canning, in her kitchen at Leveland Farm. I can not shake this image of abundance, pride, and care. It retrieved an early memory of sitting beside my grandma Doris in her condominium’s storage room, sorting what must have been a thousand jars of canned tomatoes. The narrow room smells like mothballs, sauerkraut, and warm tomatoes. She organizes and reorganizes. I don’t think she is talking to me. She is focused: stoic. I hate this room.

For Doris, and I imagine Alva, canning was both a practical means of preservation and longevity for fresh produce, and a meaningful ritual. The labour of seeding, planting, nurturing, reaping, canning, and sinking one’s teeth into a juicy tomato was meditative. Such practices were grounded in Doris’ girlhood, born as she was during the economic crisis of 1930s southern Saskatchewan. In that storage room, I am peripheral to my grandmother’s immediate concerns for survival. Alva and Doris more deeply embody nuances of domesticity, evidence of women’s labour, and the sharing of intergenerational knowledge. The home is space for not only obligation, but also for care, rest, ritual, and devotion.

As I seek structure and purpose in my life and my art practice, I think about Doris. My practice often feels tenuous—my purpose laced with financial uncertainty and self-doubt as an emerging artist and a young woman. I grapple with feelings of failure, envy, and guilt about aspiring for a quality of life that I also have some criticism of. I yearn for the simplicity, safety, and predictability of my grandmother’s storage room despite what I know about the challenges of the Great Depression and expectations of women of that era. I’m confronted by an uncomfortable reckoning. I am photographing the homes of people in my community whose quality of life I aspire to. I use a medium-format film camera slowly and intentionally. Each frame is a meditation. The act of photographing each home becomes a sacred and ritualistic engagement with real and imagined memories, histories, and meanings embedded within them.

My process involves digital post-production techniques, such as scanning and cropping in Photoshop. I crop my images into narrow scenes—focusing on areas of visual interest while intentionally, and sometimes abruptly, cutting off objects to create a sense of static energy. I’m comfortable breaking rules of framing and composition, as this mirrors the duality I am addressing: the tension between yearning and critique, allure and discomfort, belonging and exclusion, ritual and duty.