Stitched Together
2021
Stitched Together, evolved from the ideas and concepts from my previous show and paper, Lítost: An MA Exhibition and Research. In this previous show, my personal life was important to how I interpreted concepts of nostalgia, memories, and longing. Ideas of nostalgia, memory, and longing flow over into my MFA body of work through examining my family history. Carolyn Steedman says in her book, Landscape For A Good Woman, “All children experience a first loss, a first exclusion; lives shape themselves around this sense of being cut off and denied.” My first encounter with exclusion and being denied happened very early in my life because I never really knew any of my grandparents. The one grandparent that lived to meet me died before I was even two. Later in life, this instilled in me a longing to know who they were. From the age of fifteen, I have had a passion for researching my family ancestry by using genealogical websites, like Ancestry.com. Through these websites, I was able to piece together a picture in my mind of the generations that came before me that I did not have the pleasure to know.
As I researched my family stories, I realized that there was a gap in knowledge about the women in our family. When I asked my male relatives about their fathers and grandfathers, a wealth of detailed stories emerged. When I asked about their mothers and grandmothers, however, they responded with minimal details, such as, “…she liked to walk a lot…”, or “…all I remember is her eating saltine crackers…” Because of this lack of knowledge about these women, I decided to investigate and build these stories by researching documents, compositing photos, and compiling multiple stories.
To recapture some important memories and details about the women in my family, I had to interview different family members. Most of these family members are women. In these interviews, we were looking at family photos or some other form of family memorabilia, such as letters, recipes, or heirloom embroidery, cross-stitch, crochet, and quilted domestic decorations. These interviews were crucial. Without them, I had no direct memories to draw on with regard to the people I was portraying. I have taken the stories told to me, whether good or bad, and paired them with information gleaned from researching family documents. These elements allowed me to round out the lives of the women in my family and helped me to discover that the most appropriate medium to create these stories on would be a form of women’s work, specifically quilts, because of the strong link I have seen between the women of my family and this type of work.
