Renee Billingslea is a Teaching Professor at Santa Clara University. She earned a Master’s of Fine Art in Photography from San Jose State University. Billingslea is a return Peace Corps Volunteer serving the Kiribati, Central Pacific. She has exhibited her work Internationally and nationally. Artist StatementMy artistic practice combines photography, stitching, and illuminating historical stories and social topics in American History. Through my artistry and commitment to storytelling, I continue to challenge perceptions and provoke conversations about social issues, historical topics and truths.Research is central to my creative process, enriching the understanding of the stories I re-tell. My art practice incorporates material culture, through stitching directly on myphotograph, and object making. These elements play crucial roles in inviting viewers to connect with the artwork, fostering greater awareness, insight and experience. “Dahlias”The Dahlia is a humble wildflower native to the mountains of Mexico and Central America. It was cultivated and used by the Aztecs for medicinal purposes. In the 16th Century, after the Spanish Conquistadors conquered the Aztecs, they brought dahlias back to Spain. She made her way through Europe and back to America, where she is highly hybridized, resulting in the stunning Fibonacci patterns and many colors and sizes of the dahlias we love today. Photographing a Dahlia, as cliché as it may be, demands respect. She has grown to be picked for our pleasure. Her wilted, discolored petals are another form of beauty to me as she approaches her end, revealing new textures and depths of color. Photographing dahlias is similar to taking portraits; it is a collaboration, a process of capturing one's personality, and, for me, it is also a quiet act of recording the aging process. Stitching is an essential part of my art practice. It complements my love of photography and connects me to the women of the past who used stitching to guide enslaved people to freedom, serve as a political voice before they could vote, and express their identities.The hand stitching on the dahlia photographs is inspired by early 16th-century blackwork embroidery patterns introduced to England by Catalina de Aragón y Castilla (Catherine of Aragon), the first and surviving wife of Henry VIII. Blackwork embroidery gets its name from the use of one single black thread. As a way of collaborating with the dahlias, the color choice for this series is meant to bring the two together, creating something new and more complete.