handmade paper, thread, and tracing paper
15” x 12” x 2”
Absence of Attention
The works in the six box frames are archives of two previous installations. The first installation was a body of work called The Journal Project which was built around my grandmother and her journals which she insisted be destroyed. I sewed paper, that included shreds of the journals, to tatting and then suspended it all the length of a gallery. That installation was titled Prayer Flags. Shortly after the murder of George Floyd, when white people, some of them, were beginning to examine their privileged place within society, I reexamined my own heritage in South Carolina, where my grandmother was born. In my research I came across interviews with former slaves that were collected in 1936 – 1938 by The Federal Writers’ Project, of the Work Progress Administration. There are 285 of them from South Carolina. In the second installation I strung the papers along the wall and tied 285 little scrolls representing each narrative to the tatting. That installation was titled Prayers and Debts. I refer to this archive of boxes as Slave Narratives and Old Lace. I could, in more lengthy fashion call it “Interviews with Formerly Enslaved People Compiled by White Men, and The Journals and Old Lace of a Southern White Woman”. Each piece is now individually titled.