"These Story Boxes are intended to be like inner landscapes, addressing the recurrent themes of the smothering of identity and our fear of being seen - truly seen by those around us.

By using antique boxes as frames and layering my ancient looking, often flawed, images with snippets of old text and worn objects that have been left behind by past generations, my intention is to embrace the wear and tear of time as it erodes everything around us. I’ve come to embrace the lack of perfection in things. It’s so easy these days to create pristine images that are barely distinguishable from what we see with our naked eye, but I’m very drawn to the things that give the sense of someone having been there before and these can be found almost anywhere we look. I might find a scribbled note on an old piece of paper lying on a pavement, or a number burned into a tree trunk during a walk in the woods. I keep a camera with me and just photograph things I see so that I can use them as elements of a piece later. But a lot of the text I use comes from inscriptions in old books. By using those greetings and sentiments that other generations have left behind as the background to my images, I try to build up a story using layers of recalled experience and nostalgia. Very often handwritten text is all that the ghosts of yesterday have left behind." - Claire Newman Williams