Idol Mother (2025), Our Father (2025), and a third WIPMy Eyes Through Scarlett O’Hara’s. A deeply personal meditation on how past experience imprints across generations. Textile substrate evokes the form and symbolism of flags, reinforcing the instability and permeability of inherited identity. In my art, the body becomes a container —fluid, vulnerable, shifting — suggesting spiritual endurance and transformation, a place where healing might begin. An arrival of light that doesn’t erase the past but makes space for renewal.
I’d like to display a personal trinity of recent works: Idol Mother and Our Father confront intergenerational trauma through portraits of my parents, altered from 35mm slides and Super 8 footage. My mother as a teenager—her face tinted an unsettling green, an unspoken trauma that had already taken hold, remembering the abuse she endured and how it imprinted itself on my own sense of self.
Our Father in bruised colors of the American flag. He appears saintly, mythic, yet this image carries the weight of inherited ideologies—of devotion and political fervor that shaped our home. In my proposed new work I imagine Scarlett O’Hara as alter ego = Irish-American invention.
She embodies a mythologized Irishness filtered through American empire, plantation wealth, femininity — a constructed identity made to charm. Where Scarlett was cast as loyal, vain, manipulative, my version becomes more complex, fractured, fluid. Still a survivor and that’s the archytpe I’m looking at here. She survives through performance. I survive through unravelling.
Framing the three in box copper frames like a museum display case - elevating the ephemeral to a state of permanence. Flags of personal history relics. Fragile, contained. Exposed, yet preserved.
The triptych draws the viewer into shifting borders—personal, political, ancestral. It speaks of what we inherit, what we keep hidden, and the ground we stand on when those histories come undone. These works insist on confronting legacies, and the resilience needed to reimagine them.
