The Foundation Project, 2017

In August of 2017 I was invited to participate in Story Exchange, a community engagement project organized by the ViBe Creative District in Virginia Beach, VA. Artists were asked to make artwork in response to a piece of writing and present the work at an event at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. I chose an excerpt from Callie Ryan Brimberry's memoir, Becoming More.

The excerpt describes a childhood memory in which the author's mother attempted and failed to perform an act of reassurance for the author in a situation of great trauma on the family. This event of the mother's failure is a turning point in the author's life in which she suddenly aware that she must detach from her mother. I made the body of work, Foundation, to explore the idea of emotional and physical connection between a mother and her children that is sincere and real, but at the same time stifled, defective, and incomplete. I am not fully accessible to them. I am there but I am not there.