Bringing All My Girls Home

Through my work I examine memory and the stories we tell as we try to make sense of personal trauma—experiences that leave us feeling voiceless, powerless. How do we regain a sense of agency and power? Does the way we tell our stories matter? Is making art a method of participatory recovery, a way to find the humanity and power in our stories—the humor, awkwardness, bravery, shame, kindness, grief?

To explore these questions I revisit and reshape the stories, conscious and unconscious, that I told myself as a child: stories that confirmed I was unfriendable and would always be alone.

Bringing All My Girls Home is an experiment in rendering the internal as external, subverting the norm of disowning pain or becoming a victim and instead turning the past into a form of personal style and identity. I deconstruct and reconstruct my story and wear it: multiple images of my face from preschool through 8th grade. Each face a memory of isolation, confusion, and sadness.

Making and wearing the dress is an attempt to recognize and embrace my past selves, own all of my story through embodiment, and reclaim my personal power.

As researcher and writer Brené Brown notes, “When we deny our stories, they define us. When we own our stories, we get to write a brave new ending.”

Or, as Salman Rushdie posits, “Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.”

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