10 years after

a selection of images from the original series 'The Fourteenth House on the Right' & 10 years after (2015/2025)

This summer marked the 10 year anniversary of the most personal body of work of my career to date, The Fourteenth House on the Right. This photographic series was produced during graduate school as a means for processing the complexities of the familial relationships that shaped me in my formative years. As fate would have it, my family is met with the task of clearing out our childhood home in the wake of my mother's death earlier this year. This has created a unique opportunity to review the work with new eyes, return to the space that held me as a child, and take stock of what remains and what has changed.

The original series set the stage for my thesis work, Where the Rain Goes, through which I sought to expand my understanding of home to include havens beyond the household.  Over time, I came to see these two series' as parts of a whole. Even now, this work continues to demand my attention, transforming my understanding of the complex & often dysfunctional dynamics of the home I grew up in. The work continues to challenge my understanding of the everchanging relationship between my sense of identity and place.

2016 Artist's Statement:

Originally shown as two separate series, select images from the 14th House on the Right and Where the Rain Goes have been combined to tell a more dynamic story which depicts both a raw, intimate perspective of the confines of the home and the more paradisiacal destination tucked away in the corners of a suburban neighborhood. Based on my own experiences as a child, this series references some of my earliest memories in an effort to illuminate how we can reframe the conditions of our existence through curiosity, exploration, and reflection. In doing so, I am examining the relationship between place and identity. The home described in the series is rooted in the landscape and specifically in the creek where I spent much of my time as a child. The work exists as a form of pseudo-self-portraiture that is manifested through photographs of my family, the house I was raised in, and the surrounding landscape. Each of the photographs in the series are shot on 4x5 color-reversal film and stylistically alternate between new objectivism, constructed narrative, and scenes that position the viewer within the landscape from the perspective of the child. A transient landscape is described through representations of past, present, and future views of the land. Further playing with the element of time, my nephews and my mother are cast in the series to signify past and future versions of myself. Through my personal experience of place, my work reflects a broader relationship between humans and their environment.

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archeology

What am I to do with a rubber band from my mother’s jewelry box still entwined with little strands of her childhood hair? Or an old sock patterned with cats & worn with holes – a well-loved gift to express her concern for the warmth of my feet while also acknowledging my love of animals? As the great Hannah Einbinder once said (in the title of her brilliant and totally funny comedy special) “Everything Must Go!” Did the Buddhists got it right- does liberation truly come from detachment?

But oh, how my heart clings! For it knows that we cannot let go without honoring the sacredness of every precious moment. This, the crux of my calling as an artist & the root of my obsession with photography (as if an instant that tastes so good could be preserved for all of eternity). But the photograph, for all it's worth, remains limited in it's ability to render the wholeness of a lived experience. I am reminded of a passage from an essay by Mary Oliver recalling a walk among a field of sunflowers:

"I walk, all day, across the heaven-verging field. And whoever thinks these are worthy, breathy words I am writing down is kind. Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion. Come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here, and the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them."

While we can not precisely recreate a lived experience through a work of art, or even share the exact same experience as the person standing next to us observing the same magnificent sunset, we can honor the sacredness of a moment by drawing inspiration and creating something meaningful from it's remnants.

When I sit down to create, without fail, a nagging voice creeps in: why? hasn't everything already been said & done? why should I make or say anything at all? what’s the point?

We may be inclined to refer to this voice as the “inner critic,” or the "judge," in which case we need to take a moment to reframe and seek clarity in our use of language. In our culture, we tend to think of criticism as "negative judgement." As an artist and educator, it is my responsibility to promote the use of critique as a powerful catalyst for artistic, professional, & personal growth. Critique itself is not harmful - that would be like saying "critical thinking is bad!" When these questions are used to plant seeds of doubt - when we are not operating from a place of critical thinking and curiosity but one ruled by fear - we run the risk of stifling creativity and personal growth. Harm comes when we use criticism to discourage ourselves and others from pursuing creative endeavors.

To the unsure child inside of me who doesn't trust that it is safe to share myself with the world, to the people around me who question my ability and their own capacity to create as a projection of their fear of failure, to the society that says we must prove our worth by how much work we do for the betterment of the economy, to the culture that claims "art is not an important endeavor," I have this to say: We will not be discouraged.

In visual art, like in mindfulness practices, we encourage students to greet these intrusive questions with curiosity. Through the lens of curiosity, we can explore possible answers with intrigue rather than becoming paralyzed by the fear of not being good enough to even try.

Why make art, indeed!??

..to process and honor the miracle of being alive, to share in the collective experience of humanity, to contribute to a larger conversation from the perspective I’ve been granted in this life. To allow my experience to teach me how to heal myself & encourage others to find their own path towards healing through creative expression.

As for my mother's artifacts, unearthing something so unextraordinary as a rubber band, yet so intimate in it's preservation of her childhood hair, I find myself broken open a little in an effort to honor the preciousness of it's materiality and the immediacy of it's connection to who she was.

I have a similar dilemma with the notes she scribbled in her last days, after she could no longer communicate verbally. With some help, she was able to write out the words that failed to form in her mouth: "Put me back with wagon train." By then, she was unconscious much of the time and would only wake up to request meds or ice cream or coffee (3 creams and 7 sugars), none of which she could really consume save the intravenous medication. She must have been dreaming- or perhaps it was a hallucination- but she kept demanding that we put her back on the wagon train. I was able to decipher that she had been traveling to California on a wagon train to spread the ashes of my father's only brother. The whole family was there and the caravan was lead by her horse, Sandy. It must have been a great reprieve from the suffering she experienced each moment she was awake - she kept going on about it in a loop: ice cream, coffee, medicine, wagon train. Some time after her funeral, I unearthed the following photo of the two of us from when I was age 5 or 6.

Even through writing, collecting artifacts & organizing photographic evidence of her growth from infancy to death, it is impossible to convey the wholeness of her life, or the complexities of our relationships: light and shadow, dancing and weeping, loving and teaching and screaming with passion, anger, joy. I wonder, can a life itself be a work of art?

It occurs to me that I am writing about grief again.

sometimes it comes in sweet, melancholic mists & drizzles with notes of longing and pleasure.

sometimes it comes as a torrential downpour or the turbulent surge of catastrophic waves crashing against a defenseless body which, once swept away, has little chance of returning to the surface.

an art piece shared by a colleague with our Themes of Contemporary Art class; Bill Viola gets it.

Art has always been the lifeforce that has sustained me in difficult times. Not only making art, but engaging with art made by others. Music, movies, photographs, paintings, sculptures, installations, performances and written words have offered an alternative to the alienation that sometimes colors the human experience. Art, if nothing else, reminds us that we are not alone. It is through the act of making that I have been able to process my life's circumstances and that of those closest to me.

***

i forgot i was the sky

Recently, I had my first experience with an Ayurvedic bodyworker (we will call her Kandyce with a K). I was initially curios about energy work, though I chose the grief healing massage when booking the appointment with the intention of addressing how grief, in general, may be impacting my body. According to the internet, you should go into these experiences devoid of any expectations since much of the work is intuitive. Though we did start the session addressing grief, we were lead into a sequence of mind-blowing affirmations indicating that the work I wish to pursue is in alignment with my higher calling.

We quickly discovered that we both have connections with Leitreanna and Matt Brown, which was the first indicator that I had come to the right place. This is how it was revealed to me that Kandyce with a K is also a medium. At the beginning of our session, she channeled my mother who was adamant that I had come there for her (go figure!). She indicated that the presence of my mother, grandmother and grandfather were looming around me; "It's not so much that they enjoy being together in a familial way, I get the sense that it is more of a trauma bond which is creating an emotional drain on you." What a load to unpack. Perhaps this is a good time to take a detour down ye old Spirituality road...

When we were young girls, my sister claimed to have felt the presence of Jesus Christ in the backseat of our minivan after she had fallen and cut her hand open on a glass of YooHoo while walking out of the BP station in Ninety SIx. It must have been comforting to her to feel his presence, but it was an experience I did not understand. We were sitting right next to each other, why couldn't I feel Jesus in the backseat of our minivan? Religion in our family was this conundrum that always seemed to be in conflict with behaviors and beliefs.

Growing up, we attended a Southern Baptist Church with our grandmother and her sister, Rita. I vaguely remember my mom attending church with us when I was very young, before Westside Baptist moved from the Greenwood Mill Village to 225, but for the majority of my conscious life she did not join us for church. Instead, she sent us to grandma's house every Saturday where we would be well-fed, bathed, hair brushed (100 strokes!) and the next morning, dressed like vintage porcelain dolls for church followed by lunch at the country club. After all of that, we would visit each of the cemeteries that held the bodies of grandma's loved ones where we would clean their headstones with Clorox and a couple of gallon jugs of water.

I thought something must be wrong with me when fellow churchgoers would talk about feeling the presence of God's presence. No amount of pretending granted access to that particular experience. Besides, I had already been fooled into believing that Santa was real and then devastated to learn that literally all of the adults around me had been lying to me my entire life. I make a lot of mistakes, but seldom do I make the same mistake twice. I do recall feeling the spirit of Christmas and believing that St. Nicholas was flying across the sky bringing joy to every child in the whole wide world. I also distinctly remember the moment when my dad and sister questioned me in the cab of his truck as we accelerated up the hill on Sample Avenue behind the old Walmart: "You don't seriously still believe in Santa Clause, do you?" At that point, I'd had my doubts, but I can still remember the feeling of wanting to believe in him. I was 6 years old. That night, like Selena in that one song from the 90's, I gazed out my bedroom window looking to the moon while pondering the power of belief. If I continue to really believe in him, will he still exist?

It was only a few years later that I gave up on Christianity completely. I had put in my very first prayer request in my Sunday school class so that Jesus would receive my puppy in heaven. It was the second puppy that had unexpectedly (traumatically) died in a matter of months. Upon this request, the well-intentioned Sunday school teacher informed the whole class that dogs do not have souls and therefore, do not go to heaven. All the while, another member of the church was molesting kids in his home (where we were occasionally left for sleep overs). I came to understand religion as a place for exclusivity, judgement, and intricately layered hypocrisy.

As an adult, I have developed my own connection with spirituality, though whenever I have experiences that put me in proximity to "God" or Spirit, I feel a great deal of confusion and have an especially difficult time using language to describe such experiences. When my sister spoke of the presence of Jesus in the backseat of the minivan all those years ago, it was accepted and even encouraged for her to have such a strong relationship with Jesus Christ. Years later, however, when she claimed to have laid out in the back yard until the spirit of Jesus Christ entered her body, all of a sudden she gets labeled as being delusional. To be fair, there were myriad things she claimed to have happened that were unsubstantiated which is important context for the story, but that is a rabbit hole for another time.

Admittedly, I was moved to tears a number of times during my grief-healing-energy-ghost-chat-with-your-mom session with Kandyce. We were able to come to a sense of resolve around the conditions of my mothers life, which I had been feeling a lot of sadness and fear around. She lived a hard life and I kept getting tripped up questioning why anyone choose to live that way, especially after going through her old photos which revealed a complete stranger to me. For the majority of my life, or at least most of what I remember, she suffered deep depression and lived her life vicariously through characters in television shows from the safety of her couch. But the photographs from before my own entry into this world show a vibrant woman who was full of life. WHAT THE F$@#!# HAPPENED?

Kandyce insisted that my mother didn't have a choice, a notion which quite frankly, disturbs the hell out of me. It fuels a deep fear that one day I will face an event that will irreparably break something in me, that I will have no choice in returning from the darkest parts of myself. Kandyce pointed out that my mama was always happy in her way. This is true - she always kept her sense of humor and people were really drawn to that. She was, unapologetically, who she was. I always admired that about her, even if it was uncomfortable or sometimes painful. "And she lived a damn good story!" Kandyce reminded me. "People love a good story and you are going to be the one to write it for her."

That was only the first part of our session together. We let my mama (and grandma and grandpa) go. Mid session, Kandyce stopped her work abruptly and asked "are you a witch?" I won't pretend that this didn't flatter me, but the truth is I don't know enough to begin to claim that title. "I pay attention to the cycles of the moon and use divination tools to process information, but no, I don't think I am a witch.." She claimed to have received a vision of the High Priestess while her hands were on me and encouraged me to delve more into healing & energy work, which I believe is the real reason I ended up there that day. After our session, I felt light and high. All my chakras were opened up - I was practically a donut!

I have many homes now.

Later that same week, I had a chance encounter with a couple who were visiting Greenville for a few hours from a border town between Wisconsin and Illinois. I overheard them asking the clerk of a store if they ever allowed guests to do readings since their resident reader wasn't currently in. Attuned to my sense of curiosity, the fellow introduced himself and offered to run to his car to grab some tools if I was interested.  This is how it came to be that I was sitting outside a little lemonade shop on Mainstreet having my fortune told by a guy who calls himself Yonic (a sanskrit word for vulva or womb / divine feminine energy).

We had a fascinating conversation about spirituality, the human condition, legacy, love, and purpose. Yonic used a pendulum to measure my energy and consulted with his little bag of stones to somehow determined that I am "divinely protected." The card I pulled from his deck was a planet card - one that represents abundance, growth, prosperity, etc. But it wasn't just any planet. It was Jupiter. Anyone who has ever met my mother will recall her lifelong assertion that she was a Jupitarian - an alien with purple skin beneath her human flesh-suit hailing from the planet Jupiter. At that moment, I became aware that somewhere in the near-distance, someone was performing Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" for Greenville Heritage concert series. Hello again, Wendy.

I walked away from these encounters feeling empowered and hopeful, ready to pursue my life's purpose of helping heal the world through grand creative pursuits. I was on top of the world!

But when you're on top of the world and you lose your balance, it's a long way to fall. Suffice it to say, a perfect storm of circumstances bore away at my sense of security and I forgot I was the sky. One of many truths is this: I was in denial over a recent breakup and was looking for ways to distract myself from sitting with that grief. It has been the most difficult relationship to let go of after two years of loving each other so well, especially considering all of the other losses and changes that have happened over that period of time. When two people hurt each over and over until the relationship erodes, it is a little easier to let go of. But when you have taken such good care of each other and you're just not the right fit, to loosen your grip means to face excruciating pain.

My struggle to unblur the lines between setting healthy boundaries or isolating, reaching out for support or engaging in codependent behavior, and experiencing spiritual enlightenment or being delusional brought me to my most profound dark night of the soul yet. With the support of so many wonderful souls, I am finding my way back to myself and have a great sense of clarity about my place in this world. May we have the courage to share our stories, dreams, fears, & passions for the sake of personal and collective healing.

***

In closing, I want to share the deeply impactful words of a mentor (now, a dear friend) regarding the work that I made for my thesis show in 2016:

The 14th House on the Right (2015) / Where the Rain Goes (2016)

original series

Congratulations Haley on a magnificent thesis exhibition and oral examination.

Your work is the finest I have seen made by a graduate student in my 25 years of teaching. Aesthetically, conceptually, and technically it coheres and communicates with strength and elegance.  It perfectly balances individual experience with the human condition. Your poetic narrative makes room to meditate on all forms of loss as well as gain.

You said in your orals that your project is in part a form of mourning that contends with your realization that what you thought to be true is not.  I have some thoughts about this.

For me, the truth of your home in the creek is that it remains all that you imagined alongside all that you now understand it to be.  Both are true and you have not lost anything except innocence.  The wonder you experienced as a child – the light amidst the dark – has grown as you have, now encompassing understanding as a process of interleaving the past, present, and future.  While this entails sadness, it also for some embodies grace.

I asked about light in your work from this vantage point.  I mentioned to you some time ago that I recognize something of the spirit in what you do and asked if you wanted to discuss that.  I did not follow up as I was unsure how to; what I can say now is my sense that you and your work manifest presence in absence (light in the dark).  Spirit is not here with us in the flesh but perhaps in our experience of how it emanates from who and what is physically in this world.  Certain people, dogs, artworks, and creeks for example.

I love your work Haley, and I love you.  It is an honor to know you and I congratulate you on your many successes in our program.  I look forward to seeing you travel further on your path and hope to accompany you on parts of it.

Your friend, 

Andrea