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halos lost, strayed, or stolen

A Thesis Exhibition in Partial Fulfilment of a Master of Fine Art's Degree at Illinois State University in 2021.
This exhibition was funded in part by Friends of the Arts.

"I have spent much of my period of loss seeking to recover and understand parts of my own biography, and hers in the process. [...] “[B]ereavement] renders incoherent the stories of our lives with those who died and undermines both the self-identity and the sense of meaning and purpose we previously found in those stories”. This rehabilitation of a shattered world, involving the re-imagining of the past, and attempts to imagine an acceptable future capable of integration with that past, is a gradual and fragmented process."

- Joseph Boughey, edited by Gerry Symth and Jo Croft 

Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space

in Modern Culture

 

This body of work from its early development incorporates and aims to speak to experiences which possess a particularly deep emotional resonance. After experiencing the loss of my mother, my work has been deeply influenced by personal memories as they are re-played through objects, family videos, family photos, and the collective memories shared with past and present relationships. Within the trajectory of this work, I attempt to connect lost childlike perceptions with the awareness of adult emotions and fears. The work questions and embraces the life of objects and their materiality, the tangled nature of relationships and memory, and the everyday complexities of life, death, and grief. As the visually concrete is stabilized through the use of language and storytelling, viewers are invited to consider my insight and remember their own experiences.

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