About

My work explores the perception of self within the understanding that memory is in part an imaginary construct. Memory provides the context necessary to understand who I am. It tells me the events that I have lived through, my responses to them, the emotions connected to them, and how these events have shaped who I am now. Pulling inspiration from the objects and places that surrounded me as a child, I show the difficulty in differentiating which parts of memory are real and which are imagined. If memory serves as the foundation of what I believe to be true about myself and my past, how do I cope with the realization that so much of it has been fabricated?

I make child-sized dolls with ceramic heads and limbs and fiber bodies that resemble traditional porcelain dolls. These dolls act as a stand-in for my child self and interact with warped conglomerations of nostalgic items made from clay to represent the fabricated memory space. Using dolls as a stand-in for the self shows the disconnection of the past and present selves caused by the concern that the foundations of identity are imaginary. The clay conglomerations represent how the memories of events, objects, and places change and warp over time. While I am aiming to create a physical representation of the abstraction of memory space over time, the
ultimate goal is to question how I can be certain of who I am in the present if the past is largely built by imagination.