Object Portraiture is a series of images created in an effort to investigate how my personal identity has been shaped, or unraveled, by the knick-knacks that I was surrounded by in my parents’ home.  This series explores the role our memories of childhood play in our adult lives and how our surroundings are as much a part of our history as the people and events that inhabit them. 


I was raised in a home where there were things for my brother and I to play with and things that we were not to touch.  The valuable, the breakable and the sentimental objects belonged to adults.  Specifically in my relationship with my mother, there was a perceptible and defined line between what was mine and what was hers.  Music boxes were enjoyed with adult supervision, dainty figurines were not to be played with as dolls, and pieces that hung on walls were tantalizingly out of reach making them mysterious and powerful.  The need to touch things is a natural part of every child’s development and the urge in me to lay hands on things was particularly commanding.  However, as I began packing to move away from my parents’ house an interesting thing happened.  My mother began giving me things, most notably, the things that had been my favorites.  These objects, that my child’s hands had reached for countless times over the years, and from which I always recoiled when told to not touch, were being given to me. Wrapped up and nestled into boxes, they became mine and, eventually, my husband’s.  As I look around our home I am surprised by how much of my childhood is here, and how, though I am a continent away from my mother’s house, there are objects here that make me feel as though I never left.  I began to wonder how these things had come to me, and my mother before me.  I feel that as I answer these questions I will understand more about why they have lasted so long in all of our homes.

To create these images I use the scanner as the camera. I specifically see the scanner as a natural evolution from the pinhole cameras I have made and worked with in the past.  The act of creating a camera out of something that is not a camera is a powerful and magical experience. Leaving the lid up on the scanner allows a bright white background to wrap around each object lying on the glass.  This softens the edges, and obscures the clear outline of the glass, wood and porcelain pieces that I am studying.  Like the act of memory, this allows only fragments of the whole to be clearly seen. I have created a cataloging system as well for the pieces, and though none of them are priceless to anyone but me, the notations ensure that their stories will not be lost again.  

To get these stories, I interviewed my mother many times, had her write about the objects and complete worksheets that I created to help her remember and organize our process. We had many conversations to compare stories and questioned each other’s memories about the objects and how they had come into our lives.  I also wanted to know why, after a lifetime of not being allowed to lay hands on these items, they were now being firmly pressed into mine as I was wished a good journey and good luck.    

I feel as though, by sending these objects with me, there was obviously a piece of my parents’ home being sent with me.  Were they talismans, sent by my Louisiana-bred mother, to protect me from the world I was entering, or were they strings tying me firmly to my history no matter where I went?  A part of my history that could be packaged and carried away would seem to allow a part of my mother to be brought with me too.  The authority of these pieces is not, then, the objects themselves, nor is it the monetary value that they may one day possess.  The power of these pieces and the images that I have made of them lies in the stories that surround them, and specifically, how the collecting and telling of those stories blur the line that was once so clearly drawn between two women.