Gaynes works together with communities to make art books that address cultural trends that are historically silenced yet relevant for our time. She draws on twelve years of experience as an ethnographer to gather, translate, and transcribe interviews from a diverse variety of sources. She then weaves testimonies together into overarching narratives that can later be illustrated. Allowing verbatim text to play into one another, she creates an ecosystem from which her narrators “speak” to one another and to their audiences from a page. Her pastiche editing creates immersive narratives complete with suspense, desire, and foretellings of the future. 

 

Gaynes has a history of interviewing narrators on controversial topics ranging from non certified healing practices to domestic and collective violence. For this reason she protects narrators’ identities by using pseudonyms in text narration, and upon constructing pictorials overlays photographed faces with stencils. Her pictorials “translate” the lyricism of her collaborators’ verbatim narration to conserve the magic of each narrator's own storytelling, recognizing them as skilled theorists of their own realities.