She/Me/US

H. Jennings Sheffield
November 22-January 3, 2026
Opening reception Saturday, November 22, 5:00-7:00 pm

Artist Statement

She/Me/US reflects my personal experience to sustain a relationship with a loved one suffering from dementia. The project emerges from the fragile negotiations of presence and absence: how to remain connected when names dissolve, stories collapse, and time fractures. It is both intimate and universal, a meditation on memory's collapse and the insistence of what remains—connection, recognition, and love, even as recall fades. Through cyanotypes, photo tapestries, a silk photo column, and medical scans, She/Me/US establishes new visual languages for understanding the effects of memory loss on individual consciousness and familial bonds.

Holding On, large format cyanotype

Cyanotype serves as the central medium of the project. With its indigo hues, spectral presence, and historical ties to early science, the process becomes a fitting metaphor for the paradox of memory: permanence and dissolution coexist. In these works, hand-drawn lines and stitched threads weave across the surface, activating the prints as tethered pathways between past and present. Some images remain crisp, others dissolve into blur and noise, mirroring the uneven terrain of memory in dementia—where childhood recollections persist even as the most immediate events fade.

Other components extend this exploration of time, collapse, and continuity. A thirteen-foot column of cyanotypes printed on jacquard silk symbolizes memory's vertical expanse. Within it, two moments converge—her as a child with her grandmother and later as a grandmother with her grandson—folding generations into a single, fluid image. These overlapping portraits become legible only in motion, as though memory itself requires shifting perspective to come into focus. In contrast, woven cyanotype tapestries embody memory's unraveling. Older works remain intact, while newer ones fray and loosen, leaving gaps where recent memories can no longer hold. Beneath them, removed threads gather into quiet piles—accumulations of what has slipped away.

Within the project, medical scans and sensory diagrams ground the work in the biological reality of dementia. These layered compositions—an MRI overlaid with a favorite flower marking the loss of smell, or a scan paired with a broken clock evoking diagnostic testing and the collapse of time—collapse science and lived experience into the same visual field. They illuminate the tension between permanence and impermanence, insisting that memory loss is simultaneously clinical and deeply human.

Dementia affects more than 55 million people worldwide, eroding not only individual identity but also family memory and generational continuity. She/Me/US seeks to hold space for this reality, offering both testimony and empathy. While the project documents what disappears, it also affirms what endures: the persistence of presence, the emotional imprint of connection, and the endurance of love.

H. Jennings Sheffield was born in Richmond, Virginia. She is a contemporary artist working in lens-based media, video, and sound. Sheffield received her BFA in photography and digital media from the Atlanta College of Art and her MFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio in photography and new media. Her work explores memory, identity, and the passage of time. Drawing from personal narratives and collective experiences, her practice merges photography, new media, and alternative processes to visualize the fragmentation and persistence of memory, as well as the intimacy and diverse roles individuals play over a lifetime. Sheffield is a Professor of Art at Baylor University. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally and nationally and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Art Houston, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Capital One, several private collections, as well as in the special collections at William and Mary, University of Virginia, Baylor University, University of North Texas, and Virginia Commonwealth University.