Stepping into the Cantor Art Gallery on a frigid February day felt a little like coming home. The quiet warmth of the gallery created a comforting and welcoming space for reflection. Almost immediately, an installation by Colleen Fitzgerald drew my attention: a large, vibrant quilt-like pattern, surrounded by smaller works that echoed its colors and textures. From a distance, the pieces appeared abstract, but up close, the images revealed something far more intimate – fragments of family photographs, report cards, and handwritten documents carefully cut apart and reassembled into new formats. The materials used in this artwork felt immediately familiar. Objects common to all family archives appeared transformed, woven, and layered, highlighting how memory is always in flux. Standing before the artwork, it became clear that Fitzgerald was not just displaying personal artifacts but was physically reshaping them, showing the process through which the past is remembered and interpreted.
From February 3rd to April 8th, the Cantor Art Gallery highlighted some of the College of the Holy Cross’s Visual Arts faculty in an exhibition titled Impetus. Attachment Lessons[1] is a series created by Fitzgerald featuring eight distinct pieces in a growing and evolving series, using family photographs, letters, albums, report cards, and other memorabilia from her family or herself. Her process is not just artistic but also mirrors the work of historians and archivists. Archives are not just neutral collections of facts but records shaped by what is preserved and what is lost. Similarly, Attachment Lessons reveals how memories are personally constructed, edited, and continually rewritten. Through her creative techniques of redesigning these artifacts, Fitzgerald emphasizes that identity itself is fluid, always evolving as we revisit and reinterpret the objects that record our lives.
After viewing her series, I was able to interview Fitzgerald about the impetus for her artwork. She shared that the idea emerged while she was living again in the Massachusetts town where she grew up, preparing for the birth of her first child, with easy access to her family archives. This prompted her to reflect on the idea of inheritance, not just on material things, but on what is transmitted through images and memories. In her inspiration for the piece, she said that this had “increased [her] awareness and attention toward themes of family and inheritance: what we pass down materially, visually, and even psychologically.” Rather than simply preserving the archives, Fitzgerald “chose to intervene and reimagine them” instead. “The series reconstructs these objects into alternative versions of typical family and self-portraits, acknowledging that identity is not fixed in photos and objects but continually shaped through how we revisit them. The project asks how photos, report cards, albums, and other family artifacts might be reconstructed to reveal our interconnected histories.”
Although Fitzgerald now works primarily with photography, her artistic journey began in drawing and painting. She has since explored photography through experimental processes, including chemically altering film and sculpting photographic materials. She notes that “[i]t’s an exciting medium because it can take many forms.” Each piece is chosen specifically and with intent, “in response to specific artifacts, such as a vacation snapshot or handwriting, allowing the pieces to have interesting conversations with one another.” In Attachment Lessons, she employs woven prints, painted photographs, collage, cyanotype, and embroidery, techniques selected to respond to each artifact. “Working experimentally is a tactile and expansive way to engage photography,” Fitzgerald said. “It allows me to approach a subject through multiple materials and processes.”
One compelling example is Meaning of Marks, which combines two elementary school report cards, hers and her mother’s, enlarging them and printing them on transparencies and photography paper, and layering them on top of each other. Fitzgerald notes that “[t]he layering allows the two documents to occupy the same space, creating a dialogue between them. As fewer people learn to read cursive, the script covering the entire piece also begins to take on a design element.” As both women later became teachers, this piece exists in the space between “evaluating others and being evaluated,” as people and mothers.
Another piece, Matrescence, traces connections among four generations of Fitzgerald’s family, through photographs, handwriting, objects, and embroidery. Her inspiration came from discovering two photographs: one of her grandmother holding Fitzgerald’s mother as a baby, the other of her grandmother holding Fitzgerald herself years later. She described how both photos were taken from the same angle, wearing the same eyeglasses. Similarities in handwritten notes documenting early motherhood further reinforce these echoes. In the final part, Fitzgerald’s mother collaborated on the embroidery, literally stitching together generations.
At the heart of Attachment Lessons is a reflection on memory itself. “Memory is not a fixed recording. It is reconstructed each time we recall it.” Photographs function as cues, shaping how individual events are remembered. In the piece memory of a memory of a photo of a favorite family vacation, she conceals parts of the image with repeated shapes and paint, representing the gaps and distortions inherent in memory. “Reflecting on the blind spots in our memories, this piece considers how much of what we remember is shaped by our photos rather than our lived experiences.”
In the gallery, I thought about my own experiences and how photographs from concerts or vacations both preserve and alter memory. In a world dominated by digital images, it is easy to assume that capturing a moment is the same as living it. Fitzgerald’s work suggests that the objects themselves, whether digital or analog, actually interact with memory, shaping how it is reconstructed each time it is recalled. “The personal often resonates universally,” Fitzgerald notes. “Viewers can recognize those types of images in their own family histories.” Attachment Lessons encourages reflection on the personal archives each of us possesses.
[1]All quotations come from Colleen Fitzgerald from an interview on March 8, 2026 unless otherwise specified.