Artist Statement
As adults, we often look back to the fond memories of childhood that comfort us. We hold on to objects that transport us back to a time before we felt an immense weight and pressure to change: to become something that we are not. It becomes comforting to know this is a widely shared experience of nostalgia and there are tangible remnants and residual traces of the person we used to be. Objects of our past can be a well-loved doll, a baby blanket, or a stuffed animal—all of which come from a certain era of popular culture from the past and our youth.
My latest piece, Big Baby, is a soft sculpture that cumulates all the works I have made throughout this semester. This work alludes to underlying themes and issues of domestic turbulence, feelings of displacement, and overwhelming anxiety. Materially, the textiles I have chosen are not options of luxury or opulence. Rather, they reference a Midwestern socioeconomic class—specifically households that could only survive and afford second-hand items from local thrift stores. It feels like I have become a patchwork of all the things from my youth; a mismatched keepsake that is not perfect. It is an uncanny replica that speaks to the circumstances that built this work both in the past and present. Big Baby was an unwelcome nickname growing up as it was identified with being too soft and meant to instill hardness into a child. I was too soft, too sensitive, a ‘big baby’ in all circumstances. Soft sculpture is the perfect vehicle to represent overly softness but is juxtaposed by the filling inside which creates a weight. When carried it is lofty and one almost struggles underneath the mass of this work to reference the weight that one feels as we look back on youth and the experiences we survived.
