Studio

My sustained investigation work is a series of pieces that acts as a timeline. The pieces depicting parts of my grandmother’s life when she was young focus slightly more on non abstract aspects of her life (the motives behind her actions, what she was hiding from people), including what I see as being the most trauma-inducing event. 

 

As I developed my timeline I started to reflect on stories that my grandmother’s children (my father and his sisters) told me about her. How she acted, the things she accomplished in life. My house was also a fantastic resource because she lived there until 2017, so I knew her well. She died in 2018 and we had to clear out her living space, which gave me yet more perspectives because I had access to journals and photo albums.

 

In my art, I wanted to start off with the basics of what happened to her as a child and then bloom out and become more thoughtful and abstract when considering the ramifications of being separated from most of her family. I decided that I wanted to show her emotions through color. I use cool colors for negative feelings and warm colors for when she was happy. 

The first piece depicts her as a child. I tried to keep it simple and relatively objective, to try to reflect how a child might feel and think when nothing is wrong around them. 

 

After my pieces 3 and 4, there is a pretty large time gap. Suddenly she is meeting her husband-to-be. This piece, number 5, is supposed to be very hopeful. She has made it past her difficult childhood, past the Great Depression, and past World War II. She has found someone she wants to be with. She loved her husband very much and I believe he partly helped her heal. 

 

My timeline continues, showing how her pain left her as intense anger and how she began hoarding everything. The massive collections of things she owned were symbolic to me, because they symbolized how she felt she had lost everything and was trying to fill the hole. 

 

Her life was very jumpy, and there weren’t many smooth continuities. My timeline reflects this in that it doesn't have a perfect conclusion. She had moments and activities that brought her a lot of joy, but much of the time she was in her shell, hiding from interactions and still trying to be independent at the same time. 

 

But she did improve. My father tells me her anger lessened over the years, and I knew her as a friendly grandmother who had a head full of stories and knowledge. What I learned from my sustained investigation is that, at least in my grandmother’s case, people can heal from trauma. Not all the way; there will be a part of them that always reverts back to being afraid and insecure. And it is so important to have people to help you. My grandmother never accepted help and hardly ever opened up to us. But she did pave her own path, and I think you need to be a really strong person to do that.