THE NAME

Ruffin McKinley was my maternal great-grandfather. McKinley is my own middle name.

In North Carolina, my grandparents lived on Booger Swamp Road. Inside their white Mackey house were what felt like altars to generations: photographs, old books, hats, gloves, baby shoes, furniture and objects whose histories I understood only in pieces. I remember that world as dark, aged and rugged—tobacco fields, old wood, things kept, repaired and handed down. I was curious about the lives that seemed to remain inside them.

I recognize that curiosity in the way I work now. I am drawn to accumulation, folk forms, worn surfaces and objects that already carry a history, but equally to interruption—clean space, sharper edges, structure placed against all that collecting.

Photography and collage allow me to return to these questions from different directions: how we inhabit a place, what remains there, and how meaning changes as people, objects and roles shift.

Ruffin McKinley is part of that continuum: something inherited, removed from its original context and allowed to become something else.