Diane Fellows

Artist Statement

I am drawn to the personal story. In the telling of our stories, memory and remembrance intercede in our conversations, guides our affections, moves us through places we inhabit, and resides in the places we create.

My father, an airline navigator in the 1960s to '70s, settled his family for short periods of time across continents. The opportunity to trans-migrate occurred by choice, quite different than my family’s history – a story of migration out of necessity. Familial stories in the diasporic condition of the mid-twentieth century influence me greatly. These stories are ever-present, reconfigured in our current collective experience.

Traces of events are ubiquitous. Our stories never go unnoticed. I photograph, film, paint, write, to affirm the relationship between the image or moving images and the viewer, between place and participant. I am interested in imperfections and their possibilities-imperfections in silver grain, digital bytes, sound, line, language, a gesture in motion.

Working in photography and film, and as an architectural design educator, the exploration and intersection of media and processes is about storytelling. I am curious how we shape new contexts for our lives within the temporal and spatial condition of places we travel through such as a street, a building, or a room, and, when we pause across from one another, how a face can be an anchor, if, only, momentarily.

Please see Selected Works. Thank you for visiting.