A Personal Geography
screen print on paper, ink, red thread, straight pins, sundeala board
As an artist I am constantly considering my identity as a military spouse, and what it means to carry this title. What role does geography play in this formation, particularly in a transient lifestyle where “growing roots” proves to be so difficult?
A Personal Geography challenges traditional notions of documenting family history and genealogy. The work deconstructs hierarchical modes of tracing lineages and replaces them with a model of interconnectedness, where every line of descent receives equal significance and is linked to all others. The intricate, web-like structure of the rhizomatic family tree in A Personal Geography serves as the basis for the coinciding map piece, which highlights the gaps in knowledge over seven generations of a personal family tree. The work creates disjunctions between groupings of related information, curating a new geography and a unique sense of family history.