Artwork title : Matriarchs

Matriarchs is part of the series The Persistence of Family which explores the process of becoming as an interweaving of time, place, and identity.  Using composited images of my ancestors and my children, I look at identity as a bridge between past and future.

Traditionally in American society, name has been passed down father to son.  Symbolically, the marriage ceremony has been seen as the transfer of a woman from her father to her new husband.  My own sense of my lineage, however, is very much matrilineal.  I can almost see the thread that ties us, from my grandmother to my mother, to me, and then carried forward with my daughter, walking in the footsteps of the women who came before her.  All of these women bear different last names, but they are the core of my story.