Excerpt from "Wedding Archive"

These pieces are part of a larger project titled Wedding Archive. It began with a fascination with wedding photos acquired in antique markets and thrift shops. As the people in them are strangers to me, I can only speculate as to their individual stories. But in fact it was their cumulative sameness that captured my attention, a sameness that renders many of the photos nearly interchangeable despite the passage of decades and the evolution of photographic formats throughout that time. There are dominant ideas about marriage and gender roles embedded within them that repeat and repeat. In my Wedding Archive pieces, I seek to disrupt those ideas, to deconstruct and reconstruct marriage(s) through cutting, tearing, stitching, and glitching these photographs, and interleaving them with fragments of text from various sources including (so far) letters, diaries, medical texts, and military handbooks.

Kate Sutherland is a poet, a fiction writer, and a collage artist. She is the author of four books, most recently the poetry collection The Bones Are There, published by Book*hug Press in the fall of 2020.