Thank you to Mark, Gordon, and everyone else too.

Geode Origin Story is an autobiography about the relational nature of identity. I feel as though my own sense of self has been formed by the slow accumulation of memories and experiences shared with other people. My parents, my sister, and my grandparents are all important people in my life who have shared stories and lessons with me. I find traces of them in my speech, mannerisms, and the way I see the world. If you took a hammer and cracked me open I think that you would find little sparkly bits of my family among the blood and guts. 

Geodes felt like a fitting representation of this idea. They are usually sedimentary rocks, created by the slow natural buildup of layers of tiny sediments. Sometimes you can see this history visually when you crack them open and can see the lines like tree rings that circle their insides. My personal history is on the inside of the geodes that I made -photos of my family, my dog, my favorite view from the Oregon coast. And the material itself holds memories of smashing open pocket geodes with my sister in our backyard, trying to be the lucky one with the most beautiful rock. 

The process of making this felt like an attempt at preservation of these memories. I realized that I often work with a preservation mindset when creating art. I try to draw or paint a scene that hangs on the edge of my memory before it disappears. It’s a nice way to deal with my homesickness or nostalgia, similar to the art of scrapbooking, or maybe carving a tombstone (stone as a material has a long history of passing down history, although the stones I made here deal more with life than death). 

However, I think of the fact that every time you remember something you wear away at the memory a little bit. By suspending these photos of my family in resin they became blurry and a bit distorted. The scrap of writing in one of the geodes was a few sentences of a story my grandpa wrote to me about his mom and his childhood goat and rabbits, that I rewrote in my own handwriting. I wanted to hold onto it because in the past year my grandpa has been struggling with memory loss so I am aware that it may become increasingly difficult for him to share stories like that. I think identity can be composed of everything you remember, but also the memories that may be only in your subconscious or in the memories of the people who have loved you.