“…we make our lives among relics and ruins of former times, former worlds. Each of us is, too, a landscape inscribed by memory and loss.” –Lauret Savoy
The meandering veins of a leaf echo the veins in my great-grandmother’s hands as she prepared
collard greens every Friday. Memories of her hands lead me to think of the veins that ran
beneath the skin of women in my family that picked greens for generations before her. My
thoughts drift to the meandering creek behind my grandmother’s house and the stories she told
me about catching crawdads in a nearby stream as a child. Thinking back to my own childhood, I
remember sitting at the feet of my great-grandmother, as she recounted stories of her own
great-great grandmother who was kidnapped from the banks of the James river and sold at
auction.
Through creating objects that evoke emotional responses, cultural associations, and personal
recollections, I recover and record traces left behind by my ancestors and leave some of my
own. These accumulations seek to answer what role does our surrounding landscape and its
resources, play in who we are and what we become, where do individual and cultural identities
overlap, and where we can find connection to the land, to each other, and to our heritage.
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