“Grandmother,” explores a historical fiction about my grandmother, Nancy Morgan, who lived in Memphis during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Because Nancy died before I was born, I used paint to create a new narrative of a woman I never met. This body of work is my attempt to connect with her. The paintings are based on her journal entries, found family photographs, and interviews with family and friends. The color scheme was influenced by the black and white photos from that era, a reminisce. However, nostalgia can be problematic - although my grandmother lived a privileged life in the 1950s, Memphis was engulfed in turmoil around issues of race, injustice, and segregation.
The work references the fluid shape of memory by allowing streams of liquid paint to flow across the surface of the paintings, both following and disrupting the contours of the forms. Memory dissolves. Memory disintegrates.
