Conflicted

When I was a teenager, my mother bought a second house no less than a mile away from the cottage-type house where she lived with my father. She bought that house, without consulting him because she hated the cottage and knew that he would never move. My mother decorated the new house with love. Over the years, the children moved into the new house one-by-one and finally she moved in after my dad died. We always called it the “new house”, never home.

This current body of work, Conflicted, explores the idea of home. My home is here is the U.S. and yet, when I say, “I’m going home”, I actually means that I am going to Ireland. But when I’m home in Ireland, I am a visitor – someone home for a short vacation. Until recently, I hadn’t keenly felt this conflict inside of me or the questions I ask herself; “What is home? Is it where I am from, the soil I was born on, the landscape I know so well, the culture I inherited versus where I am now? Or is it the house I live in, the friends that support me and the politics and issues I embrace as mine”? This current imagery seeks to integrate me as one simultaneously both immigrant and emigrant by referencing the Irish landscape, borrowing Irish cultural motifs, and adopting the ancient Celtic Ogham script to communicate where I is today.