Soft Bodies, 2023.

In my photo-based practice, I explore the ways in which my childhood experiences affect my life as a young adult. I utilize scans of familial, archival images that illustrate specific instances of forcible touch, ingrained religious and societal beliefs, and skewed family dynamics to create iterative screen prints, which are then joined together to form a quilt. My work is a space where I can answer some questions that I frequently ask myself: How is the navigation of my womanhood attached to the experiences I’ve had with the men in my life since girlhood? How do my memories from girlhood affect my adult life and adult relationships?

Through this work, I can confront the pain of societal standards that I was raised with by examining how instances that take place in formative years of girlhood greatly affect how I’ve viewed myself later in life. Thus, I can better understand and make sense of both my current and past experiences and emotions as I navigate being an adult with wounds from my girlhood. Because my relationship to my womanhood evolves day to day, this is a concept that I will continue to revisit or reference in my work for a significant period of time. 

My iterative process begins with finding an archival image of my childhood that has aspects that hold instances of specific and non-specific memory that have affected me in my journey as an adult. Then, through a method of ripping and rearranging, I create a new “glitched” version of the original image. The reconstruction of these moments speaks to the ability to revisit important discourses around body, sex, and boundaries that I lacked in childhood, and to reparent oneself in adulthood. For example, one image features a childhood friend of mine, Turner, forcibly grabbing me close to him to kiss me. By highlighting his grip, I am able to reckon with the instances of forcible touch that have repeated throughout my adulthood. Specific parts of the glitched image were then translated into screen prints; these smaller sections of focus were first printed on newsprint, a non-archival material, one that will wither and wear over time, as another nod to memory and how it changes. 

During the silkscreen process, I use an ultramarine blue similar to Marian blue - the blue of the Virgin Mary - which is representative of purity. Keeping uneven pressure when pushing the ink through the screen and onto the fabric further abstracts the images into illegibility, highlighting the changeable nature of memory. Finally, the fabric prints made of the 9 images from this series were bound together into the form of a quilt; a symbol of family history that is traditionally coded as “women’s work.” Repetition of images over the quilt’s surface, its raw edges, and uneven stitching materially speak to the messy nature of revisiting painful memories in order to then heal from them. The aggressive scratching out of the images through the use of the top stitch illustrates the confrontation of these painful memories. Additionally, I’ve been sleeping with the quilt to further emphasize the tactility, as well as the livingness of the object. As I live with this piece, I look forward to seeing how it changes and degrades over time.