Jewel Wolf House (2025)
Jewel Wolf House is a body of work that emerges from the entangled experiences of motherhood, personal growth, and the enduring threads of familial legacy. Titled after my children's middle names, the series reflects a parallel journey—growing as a person and a mother alongside them. Using the cyanotype process, I create layered compositions with handmade paper negatives, cut by hand in a process that invokes both care and tradition. Each image is a meditation on presence and transformation, where natural wonder, childhood, and inner life are held in equal regard.
The paper negatives recall Wycinanki, the traditional Polish folk art of paper cutting, connecting this work to my ancestry. The paper itself—once belonging to my uncle, a painter who later became a postman—was discovered beneath my grandmother’s bed after her passing. It carries its own quiet history of labor, displacement, and reinvention, echoing the domestic and emotional spaces I navigate in my current life. This legacy is both literal and symbolic, a material inheritance that roots the work in intergenerational memory and the rituals of making.
In the larger works, I hand-dye the paper—an additional gesture of devotion and tactile engagement. These acts of coloring, cutting, and layering become physical embodiments of my emotional life, a language of process that speaks to the weight and wonder of being a mother and a person in the world. Jewel Wolf House is a celebration of love and struggle, survival and persistence. It seeks to hold the contradictions of beauty and grief, inheritance and transformation, and to make them visible through a material practice that is intimate, reflective, and deeply alive.
For all inquiries, email: tamsenwj@gmail
