Polished Memories: Photo + Thread

Artist Statement

“The Past is as much a work of imagination as the future.” — Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

In this work I’ve manipulated and re-contextualized found and family photographs to explore gender, heritage, and race in my southern childhood. 

I am interested in the use of photographs as cultural elements that become a sort of through-line, connecting us both as witness to the past even as it informs and helps make sense of the present. Art is simply storytelling, about who we are and how we see ourselves in relationship to each other.  Here I reference motherhood, identity, femininity, the role of race in the family cocoon even as riots raged all around us. I have a deep and abiding relationship with the place I grew up, though it is rewritten every time I return. I am seeking to understand where I belong. 

My work questions the reliability of the family photograph as evidence of an idealized family by using collage elements to add nuance and complexity to the expected story, freeing me to reinterpret or embellish various storylines in any way I please. It also becomes an interesting analogy to our modern nostalgia-making tools of contemporary social media feeds- repetitious, fanciful, idealized.  The lines of stitching, beading and text suggest the bonds that form and bind us, yet can just as easily erase, exclude, and segregate us from one another. These traditionally feminine crafts of sewing and collaging reference the fabric of our current, very complicated lives.

The aim of this transmedia work is to bring together the political and personal themes of my life, as a way to contemplate this moment in the world. Here, the media headlines, the everyday graffiti, and the framing of our collective ideas on social media become the contemporary reference points of our time, as the work contemplates the meanings found in belonging to the feminine, and the domestic. It is a map of the western landscape that I live in —geographically, ideologically, culturally —that also celebrates the roots of a childhood in the American south.