Dear Diary
Dear Diary, today is a day I've been dreading. It's the end of childhood. I'm about to graduate college, which is hard to believe. But girlhood isn’t something you outgrow. She lives within me, along with all the other girls who whisper my own secrets back to me. I am her and she is me.
What’s most important to me is to be in the moment, living in the present, but not to forget the past. Dear Diary, don’t you know what you mean to me? You are my memories, my subconscious. Without you, I am stuck in a void of nothingness.
I am particularly interested in liminal spaces as a reflection of my own experience of girlhood and growing up. Liminal spaces are seen as the transition between different states of being- the space between one destination and the next. This experience is unsettling and uncomfortable, but it’s also intimately familiar, as if you’ve been there before.
I've been holding on too tight. I don't want to move on. Senior year is a time to be preparing for the future, but I never thought I would make it this far. I'm just making it up as I go. I'm walking between worlds.
My Illuminated Manuscript, My Manifesto
Dear diary, I swear I am on the cusp of something here. I’m not just crazy. A diary is a chronological and private record of a girl’s life, her transformation and her experience of truthfulness. But who’s to say what is the true truth? Compared to a journal, the diary is about daily experiences and feelings, which always seem to be characterized as ‘girly.’
The dairy pages here explore the stream of consciousness and unreliability that comes from lack of objectivity through expressionism. Diaries are private and meant solely for the author, locked and kept under key. But there is no such thing as truthfulness here.
These pages are meant to be touched and interactive. Diaries are set in time, chronological, but here, time does not play by our rules. Expressionism and surrealism hold hands as we play hopscotch and four square, trying to beat one another in games only they know the rules to.
Adding and subtracting with paint and collage from vintage magazines is part of this process. The place becomes hectic, pages thrown on the floor in a fit of rebellion.
When my sister and I got our own room, we painted our room bright purple with baby blue trim. The paint peeled away easily, since we had not properly removed the wallpaper underneath. I decided to cover the holes in the wall with pictures from magazines, especially my favorite boy band. The phenomenon of the interests of pre- and teen girls become the butt of the joke, how we have to prove we have the right to enjoy comics or shows or bands just because we are girls, defines our fighting spirit.
Suddenness of Consciousness
I've always wanted a movie of my own. There’s something about coming-of-age movies that fill me with so much inspiration- the stories that are told over and over but always in a different font. I'm watching the sky turn, the sun dipping below the horizon.
On summer nights, my sisters and I put sleeping bags on the trampoline and sleep as the sky moves above us. Time travel always seems possible on those nights. From sunset to sunrise, dusk to dawn, there's always a window that opens and closes. With this piece, I wanted to further challenge the dimensions of painting with embroidery and cut outs to create something that was a mystery, something to fold into my pocket for later.
Using painting as a vehicle to create work that is more than just one sided, with one perspective and one meaning, intimacy is established. It's about the mysteries you uncover as you work. Have you ever looked up and realized you’ve read thirteen chapters in a book when you told yourself you’d go to sleep after reading one? There’s a suddenness of consciousness, like you’ve been dreaming and then you wake up. That’s girlhood.
Dear Diary,
You don't know me but I know you
My mom spent ten years having seven kids. Family has always been important to me, especially after a death in the family. Losing a sibling at a young age kinda shapes the rest of your young adulthood and really makes you think about family. I love my mom and I know she did whatever she could for us. The girlhood pipeline to motherhood is something I wanted to discuss in my work. My mom spent hours teaching us to sew with felt, later helping each child make their own personal quilt that I used everyday until it crumbled beneath me. Embroidery and sewing is a domestic craft commonly associated with women. But it's also violent, just like how your individuality is ripped away and becomes second in your life as soon as you become a mother. This piece is a homage to my mom and her love for us, but it’s also a rejection of traditional paths set out for girls to women to mothers. It is essential to our society that mothers are supported and thus can support.
I’m not grown.
But I'm the oldest I've ever been and I'll never be as young as I am now ever again
Mess is something I am intimate with. My room until third grade, where me and three of my sisters lived, had two bunk beds lined up against each wall. My mom would come in each night and carve out a path from the bed to the door in case of an emergency. One night, I fell off the top bunk. Somehow, I rolled off the side, or down the ladder, and landed on a toy truck (for the Barbie's) that happened to be resting at the bottom. I walked downstairs while I was still asleep and cried to my mom, who couldn’t understand what had happened to me. To be fair, I was an emotional child. My siblings would tease me and call me a crybaby all day long. The next morning I woke up with no recollection as to what had happened; only a pain in my arm I didn't understand. Seconds felt longer than years in those days.
From a young age, I was taught to hate pink, to be different from other girls, the girly girls, and god help those who act like a girl. Pink was a sign of weakness, a symbol of how I grew up in a body that isn’t mine, a face I don’t recognize anymore. Reclaiming that has always been an important part of my art.
Girlhood isn’t something you outgrown. Somewhere in me, I am 7, 12, 17, and she will never leave me. Growing up is grief, a grief that isn’t mine alone. I hope you can feel it too.