As much as I hear my mother’s voice coming out of me, I only ever see myself in her when I look at photos of us. We pose the same with our head tilted to the side even when we’re sure that it’s straight above our shoulders, and when we smile our eyes disappear by way of our cheeks. Realizations such as these are what I am documenting through clothesline. 

 

In my work, I am interested in exploring themes of personal relationships, intimacy, and how these factors impact our identities. Clothesline explores the specific complexities of the mother-daughter relationship and its implications upon a developing identity.

 

Using a journaling practice as a basis, I take an autoethnographic approach to process old memories and new realizations about the specifics of my relationship with my mother. Themes of nurturance, sentimentality, and self-actualization present themselves in my writing. These themes are echoed through applique processes. The stitching itself, an age old skill that is haphazardly part handed-down to me by my mother, part self-taught, is a time-intensive process which can be used to create new and mend the old. Starching the stitched articles of clothing acts as a form of preservation of the sentiments that I share with my mother, rendering the objects useless as garments - instead monumentalizing them as artifacts to cling to in the midst of a shifting relationship.