My thesis work examines the complexity of memory. Through reflection and exploration of my personal memories, I curate artifacts such as letters, photographs, and objects to alter and intertwine with fabric. I use fabric as a connective medium because it naturally suggests memory as it is embedded with domestic significance and is connected to place and body. By using quilting as a medium I reinforce the layers of domesticity, pattern, and ritual. 

A dream-space. A house of breath. Memory existing as an unknowable preservable trace; an excessive substance; a way we collect our past, and what we base so much of lives and deaths upon. Constructed from labor-intensive sewing processes, and fabricated architectural construction, this thesis installation offers a way to ritualize memory into an object. I draw inspiration from the way Sandra Brownlee refers to her weavings as “equivalent to the woven page.” That is, “messages…notations…records…fragmented glimpses” that “allude to the written signature and the emotion of handwriting” each articulated by the pause, an ellipsis between breath and materiality.

Fabric that has been stitched, dyed, rubbed away, mended, ripped, beaded, embroidered, frayed and hung in translucent panels to create this fibrous interior space. This makeshift sheering, this murmur, this ghost-like form, is the physical manifestation of the elusiveness of memory that I am trying to harness. Memory inherently needs loss to begin to account for its past, it is a spectral form of absence. The work remains an effort to inhabit the space of the specter and the loneliness of moments frozen in time. I am seeing the space of memory recall as if it were a house that could be blown away with a single breath.