Biography Unwritten is an ongoing work which explores the issue of wrongful conviction. A collection of weathered books whose titles consist of a person’s name, suggests that the viewer is about to read a biography. But the book's pages are not only void of text, they are glued shut. There is no story. It is not until the final page where the viewer discovers a bit of text, some factual information, along with a single sentence describing one of life’s seemingly ordinary moments. In this case, it is a moment which has been lost or a milestone which has been missed. Viewers may consider their own lives and the preciousness of these moments which become even more profound in their absence.
These are the empty biographies of innocent men and women who have been incarcerated for crimes they did not commit. Exonerated after serving anywhere from 4 to 30 years, and for some on Death Row, these books tell their “unwritten” stories. The sealed pages represent the lives that have not been lived by people who, upon release from prison, struggle to find a place for themselves in a world quite different from the one they left behind. These frail and brittle books mimic the fragile lives wasted and lost within a system, hardened or broken by prison life and void of content. They are torn, tattered and empty in the middle, as are the men and women whose missing years cannot be replaced.