Paper Trails is a powerful scannography series that transforms the mundane into a visceral exploration of debt, memory, and the weight of financial struggle. Using a modified flatbed scanner, the artist reimagines the scanning process itself — adding wheels, flipping the scanner upside down, and pushing it against the scanning direction to create an organic, chaotic distortion.
The resulting images capture the fragmented, disjointed remnants of paperwork — bills, overdue notices, and debt collection letters — as they are swept along in a motion that feels both mechanical and personal, the past coming to life in fractured form.
Each scan, distorted by the modified movement, reveals a raw, almost violent abstraction of the documents that once carried the weight of financial obligation. The bills — once rigid, official, and imposing — are transformed into ghostly, blurred fragments, their texts and logos disintegrating as they move across the scanner bed. The images, with their shifting contours and broken edges, evoke the sense of being buried under the crushing weight of unpaid debts and persistent collectors, the constant pressure of past obligations haunting every frame.
The deliberate disruption of the scanning process — the inversion, the motion — mirrors the disorienting experience of financial instability, where clarity and control dissolve into uncertainty and chaos. The papers become less legible, their once-clear demands and threats now smudged into abstraction, reflecting the disconnection that often comes with overwhelming debt. In this process, the artist strips away the corporate formality of these financial documents, exposing the human toll beneath the ink and paper.
Paper Trail becomes an intimate portrait of struggle, an exploration of the way our personal histories are often marked by financial systems that operate beyond our control. The modified scanning technique creates a tension between the static nature of the documents and the restless movement that seems to sweep them away. This disjointed action represents the way these past debts linger, their impact lasting long after the bills are paid, and their memory often trapped in a loop of frustration and guilt.
The final images feel like a journey through a personal archive — a trail of financial debris that leaves a haunting imprint. There’s a visceral beauty in the way the artist uses the scanner as a tool of both preservation and destruction, capturing the fleeting, impermanent nature of debt while simultaneously imbuing the discarded paperwork with new life. In the blur of numbers and text, there is a potent metaphor for the erasure of self in the face of overwhelming financial systems, where the personal is lost in the endless bureaucracy of debt. Paper Trail is a reminder of how the weight of our past — in all its legal and financial complexity — continues to haunt us, even when the papers themselves are no longer tangible.