I seek to preserve the emotional complexity of family relationships

Introduction

Memory is reconstructive rather than reproductive. When we recall an event, the brain draws together fragments of information scattered across different regions, assembling them into something that feels like a story. How that story takes shape – and which details come to the fore – is influenced by our present context and mood. Where there are gaps, the mind leans on expectation, using familiar patterns to fill things in and create a sense of coherence. This isn’t a flaw so much as a feature: it allows us to continually update the past in light of the present. The same mental systems that help us reconstruct memories are also involved in imagining possible futures and making plans. We live, then, firmly in the present, carrying with us perceptions of past and future that are always, in subtle ways, in flux.

Photographs, of course, are rather different. They fix a single visual moment, flattening and preserving it so that it can be returned to and examined at leisure. Yet their apparent objectivity is limited. Choices about what is photographed, when, how it is framed, and what is left out all shape how an image is understood. Just as important is the act of viewing itself: the image is filtered through the perceptions and experiences of the viewer, a process no less subjective than memory. This becomes especially apparent when a photograph connects to personal experience. What we see in the image and what we remember do not always align. That tension can be disconcerting, but it can also be generative, opening up space for reinterpretation and new insight.

The artist Rebecca Sexton Larson describes herself as a visual storyteller, but her narratives are not singular or fixed. Instead, they echo the fluid, reconstructive nature of memory. Beginning with photographs drawn from archives and family albums, she creates collages that she then layers with paint, text, and embroidery. The work develops through acts of selection and rearrangement, layering, and stitching. It is a practice guided as much by the intelligence of the hand and eye as by any predetermined outcome – an approach in which making itself becomes a form of thinking.

Alasdair Foster

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Interview

What first drew you to artmaking?

I always knew I’d be an artist. Growing up in a military family, we moved every couple of years. Everything changed regularly, but art remained the one constant in my life. It became a kind of grounding, something I carried with me from place to place.

In high school, my dad arranged for us to stay put a little longer so I could graduate in one place. That gave me the chance to study at the Smithsonian in Washington DC, which was the first time art started to feel real. Something I could actually pursue.

I went on to study painting at the University of South Florida. As I got closer to graduating, my dad – thinking practically – encouraged me to add something more ‘usable’, so I stayed and picked up a degree in photojournalism. At the time it felt like a compromise, but it ended up shaping everything that came after.

[Left] © Rebecca Sexton Larson ‘Dislocation’ 2022 from the series ‘The Reluctant Caregiver’
[Right] © Rebecca Sexton Larson ‘House of Stories’ 2023 from the series ‘The Reluctant Caregiver’

After school, I worked as a photographer with the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office and later at Moffitt Cancer Center. That work taught me discipline and attention – how to look closely, how to document what’s there without getting in the way.

How did your practice evolve to its more hybrid form?

Over time, I moved away from straight documentation towards something more interpretive. My work often involves hand-colouring black-and-white prints, situating it somewhere between photography and painting. When it became difficult to find specific photopapers in the size I needed, I began stitching pieces together. I feel the stitching and embroidery are nods to my mom and grandmother who were both avid stitchers. It’s a way of slowing things down, of letting time and memory shape the image as much as the subject itself.

How did ‘The Book of Fears’ begin?

This evolved from an ongoing curiosity about people’s aversions and obsessions. What makes a person afraid? When does that fear become a phobia? And why am I personally so afraid of clowns?

Such fears are considered one of the most common mental disorders in the US, with around ten per cent of the population identifying as having a specific phobia. In this series, I included some well-known fears such as autophobia (fear of being alone) and arachnophobia (fear of spiders), along with some not so well-known worries such as didaskaleinophobia (fear of school).

This project was created during the coronavirus pandemic, itself a cause of significant fear for many. I did not have the luxury of shooting on location with models, but I did have a lot of nineteenth-century cabinet cards I had collected over the years. So, I used the figures depicted in cards as my models. I looked for ones that suited a particular phobia and placed them within fictional settings, while altering the figure to some degree. The challenge was to revitalise these anonymous antique figures in ways that would evoke each phobia while, at the same time, encouraging the viewer to examine their own anxieties and fears.

How did you go about that?

Working with psychological subject matter, I was illustrating feelings that are both real and imaginative. For those with the fear, it is a very palpable thing; for the outside observer it can present more as an emotional response. For example, my personal fear of clowns comes down to two possible speculations. One is that I am uneasy because I can’t see the clown’s true face under the makeup. Facial expressions help us to understand another person’s emotions and motivations. Or perhaps it is because clowns are always joyful, laughing, playing around… and as a rule we tend to distrust people who are always happy.

But it is important that meaning is not too tightly controlled. Ambiguity holds a viewer in place. When an image doesn’t fully explain itself, the mind steps in to fill the gaps – and what fills those gaps is often personal. A shadow can feel like a presence. A blur can suggest something just out of reach. Instead of showing everything, the photograph invites the viewer to bring their own memory, their own unease. In that space, the image becomes less about what is seen and more about what is felt.

The next series I would like to discuss is called ‘The Reluctant Caregiver’. How did it begin?

This ongoing project draws from my seventeen years spent caring for my parents, particularly my mother. As an only child, there was no one else to step into that role; it simply fell to me. That weight sits underneath the work, shaping its tone, its urgency, and my sense of reluctance. At the outset, I was trying to maintain my artmaking when caregiving took up so much of my time. The series carries that tension – between presence and absence, attention and confusion. It was a prolonged experience of devotion and fatigue that has come to reshape the way I understand connection, responsibility, and selfhood.

After my mother’s passing, I discovered a collection of family photographs that seemed to hold unspoken stories and hidden meanings – fragments that compelled me to investigate what had been forgotten, withheld, or never fully understood.

These works have a tactile presence. They are collaged, hand-tinted, written upon, and embellished with stitching. Yet the paper they are printed on is translucent. This suggests a fascinating interplay between the physical and fleeting.

I’m always interested in how material choices shift the emotional register of an image. Collage, hand-tinting, writing, and stitching all slow the work down and introduce a sense of accumulation – each gesture leaves a trace of time and touch.

The decision to print on translucent Japanese Kozo paper was important in that regard. It brings a natural fragility to the work, where images don’t sit as fixed surfaces but begin to layer, bleed, and partially disappear into one another.

What kind of insights did working with this family archive bring for you?

Let me give an example… I found a photograph of my parents standing outside their first home – a small trailer they lived in just after they were married, before I was born. On the back, my mother had written a note to her own mother about how beautiful the pecan trees were outside the house.

That small, private detail shifted the image for me. It’s no longer just about a place, but about a beginning – of their life together. The trees become a kind of witness to that early time, holding both shelter and continuity. In many traditions, the pecan is seen as a symbol of sustenance and resilience, even a kind of quiet generosity in the landscape. So, in this image [above], that layer of meaning sits alongside the personal history, where memory, place, and family overlap in a single, ordinary moment.

[Left] © Rebecca Sexton Larson ‘Where Did You Go?’ 2024 from the series ‘The Reluctant Caregiver’
[Right] © Rebecca Sexton Larson ‘Siblings’ 2024 from the series ‘The Reluctant Caregiver’

You have been described as a ‘dark romantic’. Is that how you would see yourself?

Personally, it’s not a term I would use, but reviewers and writers have applied it in the past. I think what they’re trying to describe is that my work leans less toward traditional Romanticism and more toward the quieter, often obscured parts of a story – the things that sit just outside the frame of what is immediately seen.

Some of that association likely comes from my earlier work as a photographer for the Sheriff’s Office and later in medical photography. People tend to assume that means I was working primarily with death, but that was actually a very small part of it. Most of it was observational, procedural, and routine. Still, that environment did shape how I look at things: an attention to evidence, residue. What remains after an event, rather than the event itself.

Your most recent series – ‘Where Leaves Remember’ – is presented as a sketchbook…

This is an ongoing body of work that explores the intersections of nature, memory, and transformation. The project treats each page as both surface and site, a space where recollection accumulates, shifts, and reconfigures over time. By framing the sketchbook as a layered archive, the work examines how human memory parallels natural processes of growth, decay, and renewal.

What, for you, is the connection between memories and leaves?

Like people, leaves retain evidence of what has passed. Their veins trace temporal rhythms, their colours register change, and their cycles of falling and returning contribute to the continuity of ecological systems. Similarly, this work considers memory as a dynamic and evolving process, where fragments of experience overlap, obscure, and reemerge. Drawings, photographs, textual elements, and material traces coexist on each page, reflecting the fluidity of recollection and the ways in which memory is continuously rewritten through reflection and time.

How do you select these elements and the way you then work with them?

The process is highly intuitive. I keep a lot of images and drawings in archival boxes. I select various fragments, assembling and reassembling them until they begin to form the story I already see in my mind. Sometimes I sketch in advance, but often I work directly with the material, letting the pieces find their own relationships.

For example, in ‘Four Virtues’ [above] I was thinking about prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude less as fixed symbols and more as conditions that emerge through making – through balance, restraint, tension, and repair. I didn’t set out to illustrate them, but to work within their presence as the pieces came together.

The stitching and writing come last, once the composition is set. That part slows everything down and becomes a way of listening to the work. It is here that meaning settles into the surface through repetition and attention. Each mark, whether threaded or written, serves as both evidence and meditation. Through this practice, I seek to preserve the emotional complexity of family relationships while giving form to what remains unresolved. The work ultimately becomes a reconstruction of memory: an act of tenderness, inquiry, and quiet repair.

Part of this series includes a group of modified church fans. First, could you explain what a church fan is and why you selected this form for the work?

A church fan is a small handheld cardboard fan, often distributed in Southern [US] churches. They are typically printed with religious imagery, memorials, or local community references. I was drawn to them from memory – seeing them in my grandmother’s home – and their quiet presence as both practical object and informal record of ritual and loss.

How did you adapt each fan for the project?

I disrupted the original imagery through photographic and surface interventions that shift how they are read. The goal is not to erase their function, but to draw attention to them as carriers of memory and lived experience. As with ‘Leaves’, the series treats familiar objects as vessels for collected memory, where meaning is held in both image and physical form.

The nature of personal memory and psychology underpin all three of these bodies of work, as do practices of reassembly and repair. Do you see this work – in the way it is created and in the way it is received – as potentially therapeutic?

We all have things we do to help reduce stress, foster emotional healing, and explore complex questions. Some people find their release in sport or music, for me it is definitely in the act of creating. I have received a wide range of feedback on my work, all very diverse. And, for me, that is really what much of it is about. I don’t want everyone to walk away from a piece with the same interpretation.

In making these series, what have you learned about yourself that you did not previously understand?

I have spent the last seventeen years balancing caregiving with artmaking. It has taught me that creativity is an essential lifeline for me that builds resilience, and offers its own unique kind of emotional support.

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This interview is a Talking Pictures original.

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