I started my series “For the Fridge” by going through inherited boxes, looking into photographs of me that were taken by my mother and kept by her as precious. I sorted out images where I was in the act of creation, or shortly after, posed with my finished work, and used that index as the foundation for this series. My mother took these photos, and with her death, and the trauma it caused, came a lack of primary source information. When my immediate family died, I became the last person alive that would remember my history. I became my own records-keeper and historian, and I became the person who judges what is precious enough to be kept.
I digitally designed “doily” patterns using the same methodology I had learned in school for making cut snowflakes out of printer paper. By doing so, I began to explore my lost identity and memory, as well as childhood craft as my introduction into female domesticity and home crafts. I used these doilies as masks for the photographs I found, obscuring and distancing the viewer from my childhood and the girl in the images, recreating the distance I feel to those childhood moments. Despite my lack of recollection of the moments captured, I recall making ‘art’ that catered to my mother’s aesthetics and wants. These crafts would inspire pride and adoration in her when she saw them. This transparent appeasement is emulated with the icons and motifs used in each design, directly inspired from objects, both decorative and religious, that littered the homes of my grandmother, my aunt, and my mother and me. By altering photos my mother took of me, I am reclaiming my childhood and artistic identity. I am now the judge of what is precious enough to be kept, and what I am proud enough to hang on the fridge in a place of domestic honor.
