Like Mother, Like Daughter, examines the generational obligations (and rewards) that stem from the traditions and norms of domesticity. My mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother have left literal and metaphorical scars in our family archive. These collections of photos document their struggles in wanting to be seen and appreciated for the intensive domestic labor they participated in while also displaying palpable trauma from the rejection and dismissal of their accomplishments. These women have spent countless hours and an unquantifiable amount of energy devoted to creating beautiful things. However, they also scratched themselves out of color slides, violently purged their images from family portraits with scissors in hand, and continuously turned their backs to the camera. My work emerges from their desires to both create and destroy.

I combine self-portraiture with a variety of domestic crafts to create a feminist body of work that simultaneously recognizes my matrilineage and elevates domestic work to contemporary art. I want to counter the rampant self-erasure and societal dismissal of “women’s work”. Women in my family, including myself, have religiously engaged in needlework, baking, and other crafts, carrying with it a sense of love and appreciation while seething over that fact it goes undervalued both in a domestic setting and the art world. This project is about love and anger and the transfer of these sentiments through generations of women. It is ultimately a memorial to the thousands of hours of labor never recognized and a jeremiad against patriarchal judgments that condemned and consigned these efforts for far too long. 

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