Much of my work focuses on economic class intersections, family history, and the often tenuous relationships with both the built and natural environments. The source of these concepts is grounded in my lived experience as the byproduct of a working-class family wrought with generational trauma and mental illness. My relationship to home, the physical aspects, the neighborhoods, and dynamics of unspoken hierarchical powers, shaped my understanding of what it meant to belong somewhere, even if that “somewhere” did not want you.
Growing up on the border of Lowell, Massachusetts, I witnessed a city in constant growing pains of post-industrialization. My strongest memories are driving alongside the Merrimack River, where 19th-century textile mills once whirred furiously, labored by women and immigrants through dangerous working conditions. Along the banks of the Merrimack, right across a collection of defunct mills and part of the UMASS Lowell campus, is an ever-changing community living out of camping tents and tarps. With each passing year, the Merrimack’s flooding becomes more common as tropical storms or nor’easter rip through this river valley. The encampments wash away, leaving the area with very little footprint of what was once there, now gone. I thought about my home and how I wasn’t too far away from this possible existence as my family grappled with nearly losing the house due to foreclosure in 2006. To this day, there are still human beings living in tents through all seasons, across the river from a respected public research university and at the confluence of many area hospitals.
My video sculpture piece “Industry” was created entirely in Vermont, primarily in the town where my maternal ancestors were born. Corinth, Vermont has some echoes of Lowell, Massachusetts; the White River splays out nearby with hints of industrial mills dotting the area. Here at the river, I filmed most of the video in a location with remnants of possible farm equipment or some other rusted detritus. As I entered the river, I remembered the repetitions of labor performed by the textile mills. I used my body as a machine. I mechanized my body like the laborers in my family before me, and the workers of the textile mills over one hundred years ago in New England.
The video’s audio component includes sound from both the wooded farmland the White River as I performed. The haunting song comes on slowly until it becomes almost overwhelming. The song is Dicky Lee’s “Patches” (1962), apart of the teen tragedy sub-genre in popular music from the 1950s to the early 1960s. The song tells the story of teenage lovers of different social classes whose parents forbid their love. The girl drowns herself in the "dirty old river." The singer concludes: "It may not be right, but I'll join you tonight/ Patches I'm coming to you.” I distorted this song by placing a small stereo inside a piece of rusted farm equipment, then recording the audio from inside. It is then further distorted to have an almost drone-like quality, inspired by the hum of machinery.
The sculpture or structure that holds the video/audio piece is primarily sourced from local-based thrift shops in Corinth and Johnson, Vermont. The tent element is comprised of men’s “workshirts,” flannel, and t-shirts that spoke to me as what people may wear while engaged in physical labor. This element is essential because manufacturing-based work was one way an American family could become financially stable without investing in a college education—a life-changing way, from rural Vermont to urbanized Eastern Massachusetts. I hand-sewn each shirt together to form the collapsible “tarp” that provides perhaps a false sense of security. This structure does what it can to provide a comfortable experience, but it ultimately fails. It needs to be packed up quickly, using whatever materials are nearby to create a tent. As the viewer sits inside the structure, they contend with the unnerving dangling sleeves, the shirts’ unpleasant smell, and a sense of isolation from the outside world.
The Town of Corinth, Vermont, where I filmed this video and where my great grandparents were from, occupies the ancestral and contemporary homelands of the N’dakina (Abenaki / Abénaquis) and Wabanaki (Dawnland Confederacy) peoples.
