Memoryscapes
As I work through my artistic process, I often find myself coming back to themes of home and identity. Art has become a conduit for expressing and exploring these concepts for myself, and it has helped me find myself within a solid reflection of my place in the world. I wanted to figure out how I have come to see my place within different places I have called home and compress all my emotions and memories about these places into physical representations. I reflect upon my memories and attachments very often, and ever since I first moved out of my home- and lost a solid room there-to go to college, I found a detachment from the meaning of ‘home’. I have also been working with the concept of ‘physicalizing’ memories, creating a cohesive image that reflects more of a memory of a space, rather than a physical space itself. Going through years of low points and distrusting my own memories, the only way for me to feel like things that had happened mattered - or happened at all for that matter- felt like to conceptualize my memories.
My neighborhood existed as a bubble to me at one point, for so long, my primary ‘area’ of exploration. It exists as a bubble to me now as well, but in a different sense. I attempt to preserve it, to cast it in the best possible light; I remember the way it glows and grows, and I want it to stay that way in my memory- bursting with childish glee but stagnated in that beauty, never changing, as it most certainly will, and has to.
I have come to develop a very different relationship with my city. It’s exploding with layers upon layers of memories and life, excitement and beauty. I spent so long being afraid of it or hating it. But I’ve found so many wonderful things in Indianapolis, so much beauty unique to it, busily covering every inch and bursting off the frame.
Indiana has stayed never-changing in my reverence of its beauty. It is and always has felt like home and returning has always offered me a sense of peace and reverence. Visiting the state parks, seeing the life that shifts and undulates constantly, always brings tranquility. It is ever-present in my sense of home and I have proudly held on to that root.