Welcome Home
October – December 2005
Tennessee Arts Commission
Nashville, TN
This piece is a lot more personal than previous works. Biography is important to the overall story.
From June – August of this year I got married, bought a new house, moved, traveled for an international exhibition, started a new teaching job, inherited two pre-teen kids and began the process of making a new family. I’m only starting to process anything.
Welcome Home is about time, the passing of and never having any – I am now intimately familiar with why my foremothers did piecework. It’s about moving and compromise, and adopting suburbia – a place where the neighbors call codes if your lawn gets too long.
It’s about the fragility of inheritance – genetic, legal, societal. It’s about protection – the desire for it, the desire to be able to provide it and maybe the fallacy that it even exists.
It’s about landing on the top of somebody else’s family head first and then realizing that it’s your own.
