In this work, I combine the fantasy of my childhood imagination with images of functional domesticity. These domestic objects serve as silent observers of the progression of time and the haphazard genesis of memory. The conflict between the sequential nature of recorded history and the non-sequential nature of personal memory prompted me to represent my own young girlhood memories in small, selected moments that make up a cohesive, if not exhaustive, whole. In these pieces, I've drawn from various methods of memory, recall and reminders. These methods are both self-generated and acquired from others. I'm influenced by my family history: those events I experienced and remember, those I experienced but do not remember, and those events that occurred before I was born.
Many of my childhood drawings depict maps that lead to no particular place. The maps are unreliable and incomplete, and my simplified recreation of these partial maps references the gaps in direction and time and the selective nature of written and remembered histories. Also, by representing each of my memories differently but by connecting each with the others through the linear map-paths, I've worked to represent the feeling of my own childhood collections of objects, which were diverse and incomplete, but unified.
My art-making process parallels my disordered method of recall. I begin with a fabric base and work on multiple pieces at once, reworking, for example, a childhood character in one (“Clown”), referencing physical childhood pain in another (“Paloma at the Screen Door”), and remembering modes of play in a third (“Game: Which Cat Will Look Funniest in a Dress”). With my color palate, I attempt to reference the muddiness and confusion of many forms of memory. The bright, linear elements serve as moments of clarity amidst this uncertainty.
The majority of the fabrics I’ve used originally belonged to my mother. Her tactile and textile memories are stronger than mine, and by using these fabrics as the foundation for my pieces, I connect my own memories with her observation and reports of my own history. Most of my childhood drawings were accompanied by my mother’s written recordings of my narration of the stories, and many of my mother’s records, represented here by the textiles, date to a time before my own memories begin.
Images of the home were a common theme in my childhood art, and I still feel strongly connected to the domestic, although my American girlhood could be considered atypical. While I heard stories of fairy godmothers and princesses from my friends, I never watched the corresponding movies or owned the related dolls. Instead, I created my own characters and games, drawing from the oral stories of my friends and from my own imagination.
All my memories and reminders – environmental, situational, or make-believe –exist simultaneously on these squares. By combining my girlhood perspectives, my present reflections and my mother’s recordings of my un-remembered experiences, I’ve been able to explore a world where the distinction between things real and imagined is blurred, where memories lose and regain ground, and where the mapping of details is distorted by the selectivity of memory and the passage of time.