The Artist as Archivist // The Archivist as Artist

In theory, the work of the archivist and the work of the artist appear to pull in opposite directions. The archivist safeguards materials, preserves stability, and provides clarity for future researchers. The artist, on the other hand, often dismantles stability, inviting ambiguity, distortion, and new meanings. Yet in practice, I have found these roles constantly folding into one another.

As I’ve alluded to before, I also have my own art practice. I haven’t talked much about my own work in these posts, as I don’t want to use this platform for self-promotion. However, some recent time in my own studio reminded me that the boundaries between my role as an archivist and what I make as an artist blur on a regular basis. My work begins with memory, with the shifting traces of what we remember and what we forget. The archive offers me one way of engaging with these questions; art provides another. Both shape how I understand the image, and both reveal how fragile remembering really is.

My own practice is shaped by that same awareness of time. I’ve always been drawn to analog photography, not only for the image it captures but for how those images inevitably age. We all know the look of a fading print, and how time inevitably makes itself visible on paper. I borrow from that cultural memory in my process, intentionally breaking down images so they echo the photographs we’ve seen slowly fall apart. For me, the beauty lies in that shift: the moment when a photograph stops being just a record of something past and starts to show its own history of change.

This isn’t so different from what I see in archival work. Archives are never complete or perfect; they’re full of gaps. As archivists, our role isn’t to fill in the gaps, but to make it easier for others to find the materials that might help connect them.  I think about my own degraded photographs in the same way. The marks of decay shape how the image is read, just like the gaps in an archive shape how a story is pieced together. In both cases, what’s missing matters just as much as what remains. 

When I look at these works, I see them less as portraits and more as evidence of what images can endure. The surface streaks, color shifts, and ruptures aren’t just effects I created in the studio — they echo the kinds of marks that time leaves on photographs we’ve all encountered. The process is deliberate, but the outcome feels familiar, tapping into a shared memory of how images carry their own history of wear.

In that sense, the line between archivist and artist collapses. Both roles ask me to handle materials that carry time within them, to care for what remains while acknowledging what has been lost. Whether I’m cataloging a box of studio fragments or letting a portrait dissolve into abstraction, I’m working with the same question: how do we hold onto memory without fixing it in place? The archive and the studio give me different ways of asking, and neither offers a complete answer — but maybe that incompleteness is the point.