First We Learn To Be Quiet.
My grandmother kept dolls her entire life. Their porcelain faces lined up in rows like quiet watchers. They always unsettled me. Behind their stillness was something unresolved, a silence that mirrored her own. She was a survivor of childhood abuse, yet the systems that hurt her continued to live through her: in her rigid faith, her expectations of control, her strict ideals of womanhood.
Mirrors embody duality — they reveal truth but also illusion, self-awareness but also vanity. My grandmother’s youth of abuse is not a reflection of her, but of those who inflicted it.
My doll reflects the viewer’s own image back. She is meant to hold tension and tenderness together. It is an offering to my grandmother and to all women whose girlhoods were shaped by silence. May we be mirrors who reflect back truth.
In creating this work,
I started from an idea after receiving a proposal: how could I make these dolls that creeped me out as a child into something that could speak to my relationship with my grandma? I was inspired by the phrase “spaced out,” something people often say about dissociation. As I learned more about actual space—about our bodies and how they are connected to the vastness of the universe—it struck me that what people call being “off in space” might actually be a kind of holding of infinity inside ourselves. Growing up, I never imagined being an astronaut was within my reach; the highest honor I was told to aspire to was becoming a mother and a wife. It wasn’t until I was in my 30s, reading about black holes and the Milky Way, how the universe was expanding and that it was also inside my hair and my eyes and my body, that I realized how integral knowing the moon, the sun, and gravity are.
I began to see how the places our minds wander to, the moments where we seem lost in thought can sometimes be the places that save us.
While I was making this doll, the Epstein files were released, and like everyone else I found myself piecing together narratives from redacted PDFs. Reading these files, searching for names and dates, having moral bystander effect, trying to understand more but somehow understanding less. Wanting anyone who stayed silent to never be able to look themselves in the face again.
How the world can seem to bend itself around protecting pedophiles is something I may never fully grasp, but when I imagine life across the vastness of space, I find hope.
Made for Side Rail Collective:
Invisible Threads:
Matrilineages of Blood, Time, and Place
Artist Receptions
Saturday, Feb 14th 4-8 PM: Show Opening
Saturday, Mar 14th 4-8 PM: Artist Reception
For inquiries:
Curator: Shawna Stewart
Gallery Manager: Essa Baird