The Tellings We Keep | SF Camerawork | 2025

The Tellings We Keep traces what endures, what has been mourned, what hasn’t, and shines a light on what might fall through the cracks. It unravels the complexities of separation – of being pulled from family and community by wounds older than one’s own birth. This body of work moves as prayer and song. It carries the stories others might dismiss, inviting viewers to linger in their ache, to witness what resists forgetting.

Through self-portrait photography, sculpture, and installation, Rainwater examines the entanglements of body and memory – what it means to live in a body once denied its own autonomy. Her images become vessels, carving out space for self and for home. Drawing on Choctaw ancestral designs, she dreams into being a geography remembered through childhood tellings and the echoes of land half-known, half-missed.