Vestige (2022)
Vestige
Oct. 2-23, 2022
Material Exhibitions
2025 West Belmont Ave, storefront
Chicago, IL 60618
Statement:
Vestige is a series of collages that focuses on my great grandmother’s life during the Great Influenza of 1918, and our shared experience of raising small children during a pandemic. My great grandmother, Emily Bulow, was an immigrant seamstress who repurposed clothing remnants into toys and decorations. I was inspired by how the fabric fragments of her work reflected their origins, even as they were dissected and reassembled into something new.
This idea that materials retain memory inspired me. Linking our experiences, I painted over my young daughter’s drawings made during the 2020 shutdown. I then pulled shapes from the contours of her drawings as well as from patterned fabrics in my great grandmother’s work to create my dimensional collages. This process enabled me to add my voice to Emily’s artistic lineage and reflect on how we sustain ourselves during times of adversity.