ADD|MIX|FOLD, 2024
Each of our identities is a collage of culture, genetics, and memory.
With these collages, I am reexamining my childhood in the South in the 60s to investigate the influences of embedded segregation, a specific model of womanhood, and a deep and fraught tie to home and place shared by many folks from the South. ADD|MIX|FOLD functions as a visual memoir, wherein I’ve sewn and cut into my photographs to create objects that reference the influence the past holds on our lives in the present. The title comes from a family pound cake recipe, and serves as a metaphor for how we blend and slice up stories and memories to make sense of ourselves during these extraordinary, frenetic, ephemeral times.
These multimedia pieces combine photography with thread, fabric, beads, and buttons to complicate notions of static or singular identity. Sewing allows me to layer and challenge the image, to explore how memory can be fictionalized, photographic, and emotional. The work is intentionally tactile, handmade, to push back against the ephemeral nature of digital and AI generated imagery. These pieces are one of a kind; these pieces are defiantly human. By paying homage to traditional women’s crafts, ones I learned myself as a girl, this project bittersweetly anticipates a future where we may have little tangible evidence of our domestic lives.
