Photography Atelier

Cassandra Goldwater

Constructed Memory

Memory is unreliable. As eyewitnesses of our own pasts, we create a narrative that, while grounded by evidence as simple as a bird’s nest or a worn suitcase, must be rounded out by fiction–a crafted memory that reflects a single voice, a single point of view.

In Constructed Memory, a series of still lifes and landscapes, I craft a personal narrative that acknowledges the pain of the sudden loss of a father and being raised by a thirty-seven-year-old widow with four children under twelve and no real family supports. Shaped in part by nostalgia, and a longing for home and identity, I use bits of collections – family heirlooms and found objects– to orchestrate the fiction that is memory.

About

Cassandra Goldwater uses photography to wrestle with current events and histories both personal and political. While many of her images combine found objects, she is also drawn to the interplay of the natural environment with her imagination. 

Her photographs have been shown in many group exhibitions including those at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Davis Orton Gallery, the SE Center for Photography, the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Art, and on the Curated Fridge. 

Goldwater has studied photography at the DeCordova Museum, the New England School of Photography, New Hampshire Institute of Art, and the Griffin Museum of Photography.  Additionally, she has taken workshops with Cig Harvey at the Santa Fe Workshops and with Sean Kernan at the North Country Workshops. 

Goldwater teaches composition at UMass Lowell and her commentary on the photographic work of Jennette Williams and Jellen van Meene appeared in the Women’s Review of Books. A lifelong New Englander, she currently resides in the small city of Lowell, Massachusetts where it is rumored a renaissance is in the making.