To Be Held

2022

For my BFA Thesis Project I made a series of containers drawing from processes of remembering, and the inherently inaccurate ways that memories are stored.

This is going to be another long read, or you can just scroll through and look at the pictures.

To see these pieces installed, go here!

Thesis Installation

What is the importance of physical remnants and reminders that connect human histories? How do the objects we create with and for our bodies reflect and shape our minds and souls? Who gets to have their histories preserved and retold?

I have a constant urge to document moments of my life, taking photos on my phone of anything and everything, including my work, shadows on the wall, my plants in the sunlight, and the people around me. I write down quotes, in my notebooks or in text messages to myself, or I screenshot messages that people have sent me. My phone mailbox is full of old voicemails. My shelves are covered in stacks of paper - cards and notes and old drawings from friends. My art practice feels like an extension of this habit; an attempt to record my own experiences.

In response to these questions and urges, I am creating a body of work focused on the relationship between the objects I create and memories of my own queer experience that I am attempting to preserve. Queer bodies and queer love have existed and will continue to exist, but the ways that they have shaped history have been intentionally erased from record. Queer bodies like mine are often absent or removed from dominant narratives. I have had trouble finding and accessing images and stories about people who look or think like me. I have been told, incorrectly, that there is no basis for the things that I feel.

Every piece of history is embellished or distorted, for better or worse, by the politics and culture of the present, and future knowledge of current events will inevitably go through that same distortion. As much as we try, we can never fully know the truth of the past, and yet we use these histories to inform our current beliefs, relationships, identities, and futures.

I am interested in what people choose to record - what one wishes to preserve and keep in their memories. I want to understand the fear that I feel when I think about loss, and how that fear sparks the urge to create things that will help me remember. I find parallels between impulses to photograph, to transcribe, and to create physical mementos, in my own life and throughout human cultures. These are practices of documenting and record keeping; a decision to preserve, how one enacts that preservation, and how that affects them personally and politically.

Memory is a large piece of all of these practices, yet human memory is unreliable. Details are lost, and realities blur. Especially in moments of high stress or intense emotion, the brain chooses what’s important at random, or fills in gaps inaccurately.

For my thesis body of work I am enacting a physical process similar to this idea. Gathering photographs from my own life, these images guide me in the creation of a series of containers meant to hold and display memories. The forms and surface design of these containers are taken from the chosen photographs and undergo a series of material manipulations that create a new image, one that is familiar yet distant from its original. The steps used include digitally refining, physically picking and pulling, scratching, filling in spaces, flipping and rotating, cutting and re-piecing together, etc. After these layered processes, each photograph has gone through a transformation that mimics the tendency of memory to shift.

The containers I am making using these photographs are somewhere between locket and reliquary. While lockets are meant to allow the wearer to hold someone close to their heart, carried around their neck, reliquaries are meant to protect and display powerful objects. The boxes I am creating are meant to be worn close to the heart, holding and protecting images as well as objects. I am keeping and saving the pieces that feel better to cut out or throw away, placing them in the boxes in an effort to maintain a more complete and authentic understanding of the object’s history. This work echoes my feeling of futility and frustration in my attempt to understand and preserve memories that are already lost to me. The work and the wearer become collaborators, carrying the weight of each memory together.

Process and method of creation are an integral part of the meaning of each piece. Specifically in regards to the time and effort put into these processes, offering space for catharsis and healing, I find myself depending on my work. I am drawn to the symbiotic relationship between creation and creator, where the maker becomes valuable through producing, and the object becomes valuable through the attention that is given to it.

As a queer person, I have been thinking a lot about the contribution of a body to society when that body is unable or unwilling to reproduce. Especially in religious and rural communities, a lot of weight is put onto producing and raising children. I am forced to come to terms with a new understanding of the value of my time and energy when the end goal is not the continuation of my familial line. I am forced to find my own meaning and new ways to contribute to whatever communities I may be part of, outside of giving birth.

The objects I create and the conversations that exist around them become important to me as a stand-in for children. I am putting intention and thought into creation, with a commitment to finding ways for those objects to exist in my communities in a meaningful way. The connections that can be formed around thinking together about the meaning of our material culture become a tool for continued community. They become an opportunity for serious reflection about the ways that we interact with each other and ourselves, and a space to create new, healthier, and more meaningful ways of existing.