Facing a big identity transition, I took myself 2,277 miles away from the land I’ve been tending to for the last fourteen years to place my body and mind on another plot of land. One with its own history, complexity, and tension. I allowed the land to speak through the variations in the messy method of large-format paper negatives. I found myself at a crossroads where nothing had changed, and everything had changed simultaneously.
Inspired by the poem Good Bones by Maggie Smith, I used photography to observe my home, and teenage children, amidst the choices I made on their behalf. On a small rural plot of land, the seasons and the rhythm of life and death bind us together and provide a never-ending workload. I intended to bring them close to the source of creation so as to avoid all the mental health pitfalls their ancestors have endured. Humbled by my unrealistic goal, I have looked closely at their relationship to nature, home, and identity during this tumultuous time of hormones, growth, and the increasing awareness of world chaos. This mix of candid capture, landscape, and fabrication reflects the complicated nature of growing up. As an artist and mother, I hold hope despite these murky waters of adolescence and inevitable pain. As Maggie says at the end of her poem: “Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”
Handmade wooden sculptural “book pages” that contain the reflections of two families on a decade-long experiment of shared property.
WIP - A series about land, memory, and motherhood.
Let’s play Memory Match with little slices of life that converse with each other. Archived Instax images that span over 10 years.
Surrender is an absurdly large-scale set of knitting needles handmade out of wood. I created an eighteen-pound ball of yarn from scraps of commercial bedding and knit just under five feet of cloth. By ripping, tearing, and looping, I deconstructed the cloth and reconstructed the material. I used a knitting performance to make a loud proclamation about the love, endurance, and strength of motherhood. I sat in this role as an active participant in the expanding process of caretaking that creates, binds, and comforts the next generation. As I struggled and marveled through the making of cloth, I examined the unending task of emotional and physical labor deeply rooted in my identity.
