In This Exhibition
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- Screenprint on mixed media paper
Past Works
I have a complicated relationship with my childhood and adolescence. In my work, I aim to examine and subvert the idea that childhood is simple and sanitary – that children are reasonless blessings without motivation or intensity. Maybe I don’t believe children always act with meaningful motivation, but I do believe that childhood is neither simple nor sanitary.
By “sanitary,” I mean the fantasy that children grow up perfect and happy because they’re protected, but that’s not what childhood is. The expectation of a spotless childhood can only lead to wistfulness later in life. Longing for memories that can never exist.
I’ve lost a lot of memories from my childhood, contributing to my feeling of detachment from my younger self. Memories I still have, however, are of my aunt sewing dresses for me. She’d take me to the fabric store to choose a pattern and try to talk me out of the clashing designs and funny buttons I picked out. In the end she let me win. As a child, I saw those moments as my victories, but now I see them as my aunt’s acts of love. Not only for me, but for my childhood and for the sake of remembering me that way.
In many ways, my work could be summarized as an attempt to connect with my childhood self – to rediscover her, care for her, protect her, preserve her. I consider what I can remember and I have so much love for her, but I’m confused too. I don’t always feel like she was me.
In the Lost Little Girls series, I use ceramic figurines to create versions of my childhood self, breaking or cutting their faces away from their bodies in order to sculpt them new ones. For their clothes, I use fabric collected from my own clothes and various stores, along with trinkets I’ve collected since childhood. For their hair, I use a mixture of yarn and my own hair. Seeing my childhood self reflected in figurines makes me feel more connected to her. She has my bleached hair and hazel eyes. She is both my childhood self and my child. She is made of found objects and she represents a facet of my identity that I wish to find.
Am I a found object? Sometimes, I feel incomplete. Lost, but in the process of figuring out where I am now and where I want to go. For now, at this point in my life, I find myself through the childlike joy my work gives me, and the remembrance of a childhood that is complicated, but mine.