I have been thinking a lot about what home means to me as I approach graduation. This piece is going to be a part of a larger print installation that I want to do called, “What Once Was”, which will be an ode to childhood. The thing I have been struggling with the most growing up has been that I feel so disconnected from my family’s idea of who I would grow up to be. I feel like a ghost in my childhood bedroom, I walk on eggshells during conversations, and cannot seem to stay grounded while in my home.  I want this installation to be a therapeutic experience for me, a way to attempt to make peace with parts of my childhood that I still feel connected to and parts that I don’t. 

This piece in the installation is a reinterpretation of a music box that my aunt bought for me. On the real box is an elegant ballerina, with my name inscribed on top, as she always thought I was going to be a ballerina when I grew up. I think it is a common thing for adults to imagine for their little girls, alongside pink dresses, quietness, elegance, and warmth. While I did enjoy my time in dance, and love my fair share of twirling in a dress- it has always felt like a performance for those around me. Funny enough, that same Aunt that bought me that music box also defended me at a family function when a family member commented on my “boyness” (Whatever that means). I have now decorated my printed music box with motifs from a classically feminine one, but replacing the normal ballerina with an androgynous individual that just seems to be content and just happily existing.

I think that this piece will continue to evolve in what it means to me personally, and what it will mean to others as a nonfunctional box to assemble for themselves. I hope it brings a bittersweet nostalgia.

A door serves as a threshold, symbolizing transition, metamorphosis, and transformation. In creating a relief carving of my childhood bedroom door, I reflect on its role as both a barrier and a witness to my struggles. This door now stands as a canvas for the memories and emotions it has witnessed.

It contains memories of slammed doors after a fight, quiet shuts when I fell back into old habits, it saw ugly faces and tears, happy dances and laughter, first kisses, quiet touches, panic, meltdowns, homework, painting, pacing, cutting, clutter, insomnia, reading, and joy. My door worked tirelessly to keep the outside from coming in, but never kept me safe from myself. No matter how hard I try to stop the transformation, I give in. I now wanted to reclaim this piece of my history. My door transforms alongside me. 

By bringing deep-rooted hurts and comforts to its surface, I can welcome its history instead of fighting it. I can now see its illusion. What once frightened me and caused me great shame now embodies resilience and acceptance. This transformation of myself shouldn't be fought but should be embraced, as my bedroom door embraces me.

In this work I want to reclaim my home by deconstructing my perception of the house that has been tainted by memories.

Each of these etchings holds a piece of a larger poem I wrote after reflecting on a certain time in my life. 

rest can be a struggle to stay still, to calm the mind, to stop thinking. 

rest can also be a snapshot in time where one was able to be truly present in a moment. 

I often forget what it is like to rest. It seems like it is almost an impossible task at times. 

Here I can capture a moment of rest in time. I can remember my hands gliding over the fabric as I pressed It to the chair's surface.

My mind was calm, focused on feeling the cloth and wood textures under my touch, the ridges and edges, curves and bends. 

I wonder how much closer I can get to rest?

When off the lamp reads, "my mom likes to read at night."

When on the lamp reads, "I can see a glow under the door."

For this particular investigation, I dove deeper into the ways of thinking about objects and the associations that we have with them. I have focused on the role of a bedside lamp, as it evokes mixed feelings of nostalgia, loneliness, and comfort for me as its glow under the doorway was the sole way I would check if my Mother was still awake at night. This seemingly mundane object transformed into a beacon of either comfort or disappointment, as if the light was on I knew I was welcome to come into her bedroom, and if it was off I knew that she was asleep. It would make me both happy and sad to see if the light was on, on one hand, I knew I would be able to say goodnight to my Mom, and if I was met with darkness, I knew that I would have to wait to see her in the morning. While walking down the stairs from my bedroom to hers I would chant to myself, 

“Will I be too late?”, just hoping I could hug her goodnight. 

The lamp used in this installation is my Mom’s actual lamp that I transformed into a piece that holds and shares an intangible memory of mine that I hope to translate to you, the viewer. I used screen-printing techniques that involved pushing ink through a template that I designed myself, which will allow ink only through certain areas of mesh in the screen to create an image when the mesh screen is taken away. The text printed on the outside and inside of the shade is my own handwriting, the images are drawn by me, and the paper-like figures are designed by my hand. Through the push and pull of screen-print, I have reclaimed this object as my memories' own. 

As you make your way around this lamp and turn on its light, I encourage you to think about your personal relationship with an object like this. What memories might surround you as you contemplate your relationships with loved ones, routines, spaces, and objects? 

Perhaps you have a similar memory to me. A simple lamp that is instead a beacon of distorted comfort.

This comforter represents a crossover of comforting memories and haunting ones. 

Gifted to me by grandma when I was 4 years old, this blanket reminds me of warm nights at her house, fun-filled sleepovers, and movie nights. However, it also brings me back to entrapping memories of another me, as if this artifact of memory has trapped pieces of my past self within it, begging me to come back to the person I was when I used its covers for comfort. 

This “me” is not the same  that I see today. 'She' is trapped in a rigid memory that my family has of me, with specific expectations and ideals that I must fit within.  A lot of the time I feel that I let them down in someway. This rigidity is broken here when “me” is able to bend and move beyond its frame. Yet “me” is also making some effort to appease its surroundings by appearing completely trapped, much like myself trapped in a crossover of memories that are not my own.

 “you” left pieces of “me” behind. Pieces of “us”. I ask, how does it feel to be a person completely different from a memory?

“Best Buddy”, that's what my brother calls me. As twins, we have always been “built-in” best friends.

In this piece, I wanted to create something that would attempt to capture the feeling of childhood, nostalgia, and the closeness of two people that have spent their entire lives together. 

This led me to some small dolls that my mom bought my brother and me because they reminded her of us. I myself played with these dolls as I positioned them in ways my brother and I would always play growing up. I took it a step further by incorporating a digital shrunken-down image of a plush dog that has followed my brother and me around since we were two. 

After printing the initial images I felt that something was missing. The dollhouse lines were all there, and the photos of the dolls with our plush dog were there too but something felt wrong. 

So to finish the piece, I asked my brother to come and color with me like we used to. 

We scattered the pages onto the floor and found the crayons that I’d held onto since elementary school and began to color together. We didn't care about staying inside the lines or being color-accurate. We just existed together, the way that we used to. “Best Buddies”. 

When beginning this project, I was extremely nervous about screenprinting, as I had little experience with the process, and felt overwhelmed when approaching this way of making, particularly anxiousness surrounding the layering process. I decided to delve deeper into that feeling of anxiousness and have my image be driven by past experiences with being overwhelmed, disorientated, and out of my element. I pulled from my current investigation of my relationships with objects in space to gather a collection of objects that were important to me growing up. 

I kept all of these in my own room and would often be surrounded by these objects when I had episodes of hyper-awareness of sounds, touch, and light. I would get so anxious that I could not tell where I was orientated in space and would often end up laying on the floor to begin to ground myself. 

As I laid on the ground, I felt the world spinning. Objects and sounds overlap one another. I can no longer tell if I’m real or not.

I wanted to induce this feeling of disorientation and confusion of what is up and what is down for the viewer. I wanted to give the viewer a peek into how I observed the world.

The result is an image that feels attached to reality while also feeling incorrect in orientation the closer the viewer looks. It induces a detachment from the real while also feeling familiar.