lineage

The process of creative narrative making is inextricable from the physical mechanisms of our very survival. In her essay collection, Girlhood, writer and professor Melissa Febos considers what it takes to detach ourselves from others’ perceptions of us:

We are all unreliable narrators of our own motives. And feeling something neither proves nor disproves its existence…The true telling of our stories often requires the annihilation of other stories, the ones we build and carry through our lives because it is easier to preserve some mysteries. We don’t need the truth to survive, and sometimes our survival depends on its denial.

That our stories and memories do not always reflect an objective truth, but often act as trap doors to new, unforeseen traumas, can be lost on storytellers and memory makers themselves. The dubious accuracy of our own memorializing, for better or worse, may be key to our very will to live.

Meine Omi survived the Allied bombing of her home town of Leonberg before emigrating to the United States. The traumas of war time scarcity and violence left indelible behavioral remnants deep within her. Even sixty years later, I grew up hearing the stories of a local pretzel maker buried in rubble from American bomb raids, or her childhood game to see who could dive into a roadside ditch the fastest during Allied strafing runs. Until her passing in 2021, she continued to hoard non-perishable food in the (unlikely?) event of rationing, and repeatedly vowed to commit suicide rather than live through another war. A part of me is grateful she passed away before February 2022.

Meine Mama has her own well-worn stories of persistence. She tells of an idyllic childhood in Germany before her mother’s, my Omi’s, marriage forced them to resettle in America. She recalls being called a “kraut” and “Nazi” by her classmates in Utah, though she eventually stood up to the bullies. She bore the brunt of my Omi’s psychological trauma and moved out at 16, a precocious student who threw herself into academics and became a part of the campus-based American anti-war movement. Yet, she still feels a perpetual foreignness, disconnected from both the German and American experience.

My own narrative has been influenced by these dynamic women, who simultaneously held America at an arm’s length while seeking opportunity and survival here. As a result, despite being born a citizen of this country, I too exist somehow in between. I am an inevitable product of contemporary Midwestern America, forged by twentieth century European trauma. 

Through improvisational drawing, print, performance, and filmmaking techniques, I transpose this ‘in between’ into visual, physical structures. I generate figurative snapshots that weave in and out of realistic rendering, integrating distinct and elusive mark-making to replicate the ways our stories and recollections build, one atop the other, to protect and propel us.

Objects and materials linked to my everyday life and family past are incorporated into my creative process. These not only enhance the textural dimensionality of my work, but also endow the viewer with a deeper sense of the intimate cultural idiosyncrasies that make up collective memory within intergenerational female lineage. 

The creative chronicling of the mind is manifest in physical forms at a scale, and over a duration, large enough to inhabit. Febos writes: 

To acknowledge rather than dismiss the gravity of experience that also happens to be ordinary and shared by many people has been transformative, a doorway to authentic living.

In my practice, I enable this combination of mapping, memory, and body to shift in and out of my present self, informing the making of art that recontextualizes my mother’s and grandmother’s histories, and imparts my own honest, emotional experiences.