MURMURATIONS
monotype and graphite on Japanese tengujo paper
Combining words and phrases from interviews conducted with women and nonbinary individuals who have relocated to a different place, this visual conversation—formed from drawings and monotypes—serves as a reflection on the idea of ‘home’ and the difficulties of displacement.
monotype and graphite on Japanese tengujo paper
Combining words and phrases from interviews conducted with women and nonbinary individuals who have relocated to a different place, this visual conversation—formed from drawings and monotypes—serves as a reflection on the idea of ‘home’ and the difficulties of displacement.
I began this body of work with the desire to let women tell their stories in their own words. Given my own complicated journey of expatriation, I was particularly interested in how other people from underrepresented groups experience the process of relocation. I started interviewing women and nonbinary people who had been displaced, collecting the interviews in a physical archive and transcribing the sentences into text-based monotypes on tengujo, an ultra-thin (.02mm) paper typically used for archiving and repairing historical documents. By joining together words which share a kindred spirit, I am simultaneously exploring and questioning the notion of home, while opening a dialogue between these individuals and the public.
Over the course of six months, I recorded my interviews with women and nonbinary people into a physical archive. Accompanying the monotype pieces, the full interviews are all available to read (though any personal or identifying information has been omitted to protect the interviewees’ privacy). Unbound and handled loosely, it is expected that the interviews and their vellum counterparts will ultimately become mixed up, adding to the kindred solidarity of the words—they do not exist in isolation.
