/ Work /
Personal objects and landscapes become points of departure for examining how experience is held, disrupted, and reconstructed.
Pate’s work explores memory and perception through photography, scanography, physical materials, and experimental processes.
// Interruptions
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// Always
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// Strangeland
// Interruptions
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Interruptions investigates the intersections of neurology, memory, and perception, translating the lived experience of epileptic seizures into visual form.
Working with preserved botanicals, flatbed scanning, handheld scanography, and digital intervention, Pate uses physical remnants of memory and experience as both anchors and proxies for neurological disruption. The botanicals—dried flowers preserved from her father’s funeral—carry a material relationship to memory while remaining fragile and subject to change.
Scanning functions as both a recording device and metaphorical diagnostic tool, echoing the MRIs and EEGs used to observe neurological activity. Through movement, repetition, distortion, and fragmentation, Pate shifts the scanner from a tool of documentation toward a means of visualizing an internal experience.
The process extends into the landscape through handheld scans of earth and place, further collapsing distinctions between memory, material, and image.
Presented as large-scale photographic prints, Interruptions oscillates between frenetic visual rhythms and stillness, transforming disrupted patterns of experience into contemplative sensory environments.
// Interruptions
Always documents the final summer Pate’s family spent together at their remote lake property in Alabama following her father’s diagnosis with stage IV lung cancer.
The property was central to Pate’s childhood, carrying years of family history and memory.
Knowing her father would soon no longer be present there altered the act of looking. Familiar landscapes became charged with the anticipation of absence.
Moving between landscape, abstraction, portraiture, and close observations of the natural environment, Always considers how memory becomes embedded in place—and how our relationship to a place shifts through loss.
The work exists as a series of exhibition prints and as a photobook.
// Always
Strangeland considers the instability of memory through the landscapes of Iceland.
Living with epilepsy, Pate experiences memories that can return fragmented, blurred, or dreamlike. Rather than resisting these shifts, she allows them to inform the way she photographs and interprets place.
Traditional landscapes are juxtaposed with abstractions created through intentional composition, prisms, and on-site scanography. Images move between clarity and dissolution, reflecting the tension between being present within a landscape and the changing memory of it.
The resulting work embraces distortion, experimentation, and beauty as part of the experience of remembering.
// Strangeland
Strangeland considers the instability of memory through the landscapes of Iceland.
Living with epilepsy, Pate experiences memories that can return fragmented, blurred, or dreamlike. Rather than resisting these shifts, she allows them to inform the way she photographs and interprets place.
Traditional landscapes are juxtaposed with abstractions created through intentional composition, prisms, and on-site scanography. Images move between clarity and dissolution, reflecting the tension between being present within a landscape and the changing memory of it.
The resulting work embraces distortion, experimentation, and beauty as part of the experience of remembering.