My artwork is a way for me to find community. I am American, and as the only child of educators, my childhood was spent relocating from one city to the next without much of a sense of belonging or rootedness. My ancestral ties to Nova Scotia date back hundreds of years, and when I moved to Halifax from Oklahoma, it was the first time in my life I lived in a place that held stories about my history. My process of meeting with distant and estranged family members, visiting and meditating on the land, and researching the history of Jeddore resulted in my project "I Fell Upward through the Northern States," an installation that attempts to bring together disparate stories of my family history through a variety of sources and abstractions. Through the installation, I invite viewers to walk through my journey of piecing together an identity following generations of lost stories, memories, and connections.
