Inhairitance
Displayed at:
Un/Raveling: a Collective Mourning group show at Harold J Miossi Gallery in San Luis Obispo CA
2020
Hysteria Kolectiva: group show at Matamoros 404 in Oaxaca City, Oaxaca, Mexico
2023
Media: knitted brass wire, brass chain, synthetic hair, artist's hair, sea salt
Accompanying text:
Inhairitance
There is a substantial amount of trauma and darkness in my lineage, particularly along the line that travels through me, my mother, and her father. The three of us have much in common. We are all sensitive, creative dreamers, we struggle with mental illness and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and we all have the same hair. Having been negatively impacted by ancestral trauma my whole life, this work is an attempt to balance my experience by also accessing the gifts and strengths of my lineage.
My grandfather, Stanley, was a bright, kind, sensitive, creative man with curly, honey-colored hair. His brightness was squelched by his abusive mother and he suffered terrible anxiety and depression. He later fought in the Korean War and came back with PTSD. He did not have the resources he needed to heal from these traumas and mental health issues, and he took his life at the age of 28, when my mother was just two years old.
My mother, Leah, is a bright, kind, sensitive, creative woman with long curly, honey-colored hair. After her father died, her mother remarried a terrible man who secretly abused my mother every day from when she was 6 until he died from cancer when my mom was 16. Her brightness was squelched by his abuse. She has suffered from mental illness, alcoholism, and PTSD her whole life. She’s still alive, but is barely functional and rarely leaves her house.
I am a bright, kind, sensitive, creative person with long curly, honey-colored hair. I had a wonderful early childhood, raised by loving parents. At the age of 9, my mother’s mental illness and alcoholism started to take over her life, and subsequently my life. I naively tried to help her by absorbing her pain and trauma, which triggered substantial anxiety and depression in my already susceptible brain chemistry, and I ended up diving into drugs, alcohol, and destructive behavior at the age of 11 to cope with it. These were manifestations of the trauma I absorbed from my mother, which she in turn had absorbed from her father.
Understandably, I have tried to separate and untangle myself from my ancestors’ burdensome legacy, in an attempt to lessen my pain, but I have come to realize that, not only does it feel like running away and denying a part of myself, it also has not been effective. With this piece, I’m reweaving our hair, our fate, in a new way. Rather than seeing my relatives’ tragic lives as a shared destiny that will play out in my life too, I am utilizing the strengths, gifts, and unused potential they have left for me—my inhairitance—and turning it into a fuel source. My mother and grandfather had many talents, ambitions, brilliance, and dreams they did not realize because they could not find a way out of their suffering. I am carrying out those dreams and their unfulfilled potential in order to heal myself and subsequently our lineage.