For interdisciplinary artist Kaitlin Santoro, memory is a material, a process, and a meditation to loved ones memories. Santoro’s creative practice is grounded in photography, sculpture and printmaking, mediums she uses to delve into the fragility of memory as it relates to dementia and generational trauma.
“My work is deeply influenced by the experience of memory loss. I have a family history of dementia, particularly amongst the women in my family,” says Santoro. “So that experience of seeing my loved ones slowly fade away impacted my practice.”
Santoro’s work has been exhibited internationally and at renowned institutions like Pilchuck Glass School and Oxbow School of Art. She’s eager to see how the residency will shape her next body of work. “This experience is about pushing boundaries, not just in materiality, but in the ways we think about memory, loss, and what is remembered but what is also forgotten.”
Santoro’s approach is highly experimental. “I work with a lot of fugitive materials, or materials that shift and transform depending on the environment they’re in or often need some sort of activation, either by a natural element like sunlight or heat or even by audience participation,” she says. Santoro created a process for printmaking using glass. She laser-etches archival images onto glass plates, which are then used to create prints. However, with each use, the glass inevitably cracks, mirroring the fragmentation of memory over time. She collects the shattered pieces, re-inks them, and continues the printing process, allowing the prints to evolve with each iteration.
Similar in their interactive nature, Santoro also creates water-evaporating prints to explore the transient nature of recollection. Using old family photographs printed on water-soluble paper, she submerges the images in shallow trays of water. As the liquid evaporates, the images shift and dissolve, leaving behind only faint, ghostly impressions — an artistic meditation on how memories fade and distort with time.
At Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts & Agriculture (PMRCAA), Santoro will continue her exploration of these ephemeral materials, conducting experiments with sugar castings and photochromic pigments, or substances that remain invisible until activated by UV light. “I would really like to do outdoor installations and documentation of the materials reacting to an outdoor environment versus a more structured indoor environment.”
This year’s theme of care and stewardship at PMRCAA aligns closely with Santoro’s artistic philosophy and process-based work. Reflecting on the nature of her work, Santoro shares a final thought: “Loss is not the most fun thing to go through, but it’s inevitable. Finding peace and maybe beauty in loss is important,” says Santoro. “You grieve for people that you’ve lost because hopefully you’ve had a good relationship with them. There’s a beauty in that.”
Learn from Santoro directly at the Open Studio event on May 29 from 4-6 p.m, alongside fellow artists Liza Birbaum and Krista Schoening.
