The branching veins of a leaf echo the veins in my great-grandmother’s hands as she prepared collard greens every Friday. Those memories 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-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.
Advisor: Kamrooz Aram
Mentor: Jill Slosburg-Ackerman
Artists
Louise Bourgeois
Eva Hesse
El Anatsui
Tony Cragg
Leonardo Drew
Rachel Whiteread
Susan Hiller
Alison Saar
Elizabeth Murray
Allan McCollum
Papers
Residency Summary
The Unreliability of the Archive
A Precious Inheritance
Feeling Your Way Through Memory
Semester Summary
Bibliography
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