I was raised with privilege in the South, and I experienced things too young that put me in over my head. While I was given everything I could have ever wanted, unexpected losses stayed with me and showed me that this privilege cannot take care of everything. My culture helped create voids and inabilities to re-experience memories that I did not understand, so reconciliation was never found. Outdated social traditions that are still observed in Southern society today have created rifts and pretenses in the way our culture is structured. Some of my work confronts social traditions and rights of passage I have experienced in Southern privilege and the faults that lie within, while others attempt to deal with loss, impermanence and deterioration through an investigation of specific places and objects.
I used to believe that the unsettling emptiness I have always felt was rooted solely in losing parts of and people in my life, that change was bad, and things could never be the same after you had lost someone that held part of you. I believed this, fully, until I moved to Boston and was in a place where I was not emotionally connected to the environment around me. I spent a year yearning for the places I could not resolve, wanting everything that I could not run from fast enough.
These memories and places will never be the same, but it is my responsibility to sincerely reconcile and move on from these parts I have lost in order to fill the voids. I have always struggled to find a way to conform my emotional needs with the way that Southern society and my family suggests that I live. This is a struggle for everyone, regardless of culture; however, growing up as a Southern woman in old traditions presents a rare juxtaposition because present experience does not align with antiquated traditions. The fronts presented in major events—whether grieving in a funeral, coming into society during cotillion or fully coming into womanhood and marrying off—are not allowed to waver in order to present proper etiquette. This pressure in presentation causes a reservation of distress and creates the rifts in my psyche that I will always have because I am a hypocrite and human in generally wanting the same things that I have recognized issues within.
I exploit traditional Southern colloquialisms, contemporary material culture, rights of passage, inherited social customs and pressures placed on my shoulders that I have experienced or people close to me are experiencing to investigate and push the imbalance between my instincts and the expected, accepted traditions and behavior. Using authentic materials, like dresses I would purchase, traditionally southern flowers, cigarettes, tobacco, vegetables my grandparents used to grow or centuries-old humiliation techniques, is inherent in my work because it allows me to directly and sincerely manipulate or destroy the things that I covet to further reconciliation for my relationship with the geographically-specific society that I was—and am still being—raised in.
I used to believe that the unsettling emptiness I have always felt was rooted solely in losing parts of and people in my life, that change was bad, and things could never be the same after you had lost someone that held part of you. I believed this, fully, until I moved to Boston and was in a place where I was not emotionally connected to the environment around me. I spent a year yearning for the places I could not resolve, wanting everything that I could not run from fast enough.
These memories and places will never be the same, but it is my responsibility to sincerely reconcile and move on from these parts I have lost in order to fill the voids. I have always struggled to find a way to conform my emotional needs with the way that Southern society and my family suggests that I live. This is a struggle for everyone, regardless of culture; however, growing up as a Southern woman in old traditions presents a rare juxtaposition because present experience does not align with antiquated traditions. The fronts presented in major events—whether grieving in a funeral, coming into society during cotillion or fully coming into womanhood and marrying off—are not allowed to waver in order to present proper etiquette. This pressure in presentation causes a reservation of distress and creates the rifts in my psyche that I will always have because I am a hypocrite and human in generally wanting the same things that I have recognized issues within.
I exploit traditional Southern colloquialisms, contemporary material culture, rights of passage, inherited social customs and pressures placed on my shoulders that I have experienced or people close to me are experiencing to investigate and push the imbalance between my instincts and the expected, accepted traditions and behavior. Using authentic materials, like dresses I would purchase, traditionally southern flowers, cigarettes, tobacco, vegetables my grandparents used to grow or centuries-old humiliation techniques, is inherent in my work because it allows me to directly and sincerely manipulate or destroy the things that I covet to further reconciliation for my relationship with the geographically-specific society that I was—and am still being—raised in.
