Artist Statement
I am interested in memory and how the memories that we carry with us have formed our individuality. My work explores how we as adults choose to keep and hold onto certain memories and completely forget others all together. In this exploration I am looking at this process of selective memory by searching out my own childhood memories and analyzing their content. This became an interest of mine recently when I noticed that I had been working with the same types of images since grade school age. The imagery that I use has become a physical representation of monumental events in my life. I am a seamstress of memory in the way that I stitch together elements of my childhood to form a physical and visual narrative of memory.
I am engaged in putting together fragments of past thought to create a new image through the use of stitching or mending, layering, painting, and reproduction through printing. These memories and icons are produced onto wood or canvas and layered with paint, fabric, screen printing, and lithography to recreate an image that is both entirely new and yet pulled from the past. My work explores ideas about family ideology, memory and its way that it takes ahold of us. It is concerned with notions of feminism, structures within society, the family, and those imposed upon ourselves. These ideas are expressed through the depictions of anatomical diagrams, maps, windows, locks, hoop skirts, and corsets because each of these images represents a direct memory of my own.
Through my work, I am further researching myself and I why I have chosen to remember certain events, people, and objects. It is an ongoing process through which I am digging through family photo albums and making lists of core moments of my life to translate into a tangible image that takes the form of painting that is unconsciously taking a life of its own. The end result is work that is entirely personal, and yet suggestive of larger cultural categories of memory that the viewer can discover and contribute their own memories as well.