An act of returning to a landscape that has changed its locks—as it does not recognize me as I do not recognize my grandmother at 19. Yet we have met before. I am returning as a daughter and a granddaughter. To these images I never knew and the houses that were a home to you long before you were a home to me. There is a gate preventing me from entering our first home together, you are on the other side and I am trying to get through but the house is no longer ours and I’m not sure it ever was.
I have often wondered where I return to when the house is empty and the people are gone. Retracing my family’s past of relocation through actuality and archives, I have come close to an understanding. Using these archival images to fill in memories of a time unknown to me and reprinting them onto fabric, I have stitched them together to form curtains that open to recent photographs of the various houses that my mom, grandmothers and I have lived in. Now hollow structures, they serve as physical proof of existence, one that precedes life and acts as a transitory space for those who occupy it. Maybe to return is not somewhere you have been before but a place you have once known through others. And maybe that is a box full of images.
