The basis of my project is directly related with the title of our studio, “Boundaries, Borders, and the Imaginary.” I believe that between every person there are borders whether that be from one’s ethnicity, heritage, and even language. In order to really begin to get to know someone we have to address these borders and begin to take them down.

For my project I decided to do some background research about myself and my family and then take those pieces of information and begin to construct my own “Border.” Each of the eleven bricks used in my installation represent a person from my family and the top brick represents myself.

Like a brick wall, if one of the bricks is removed the wall will collapse, and if one of my ancestors were to never be born I would not exist either. Each of the eleven bricks has a word written on them which I gathered from a survey that was sent to my family asking them to give a one-word response that describes the specific ancestor.

After gathering all of the responses I then went through them all and picked the ones that I thought were most interesting or a common response. While some of the words are fairly self-explanatory, some required me to follow up with the person who submitted the response to get the backstory of the word they chose.

My favorite example of this is the word “Coal.” This was a response about my great grandfather on my mom’s side of our family. I never met him before but “Coal” represented his occupation in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where he worked long and hard hours as a coal miner which ultimately was the reason for his death.

These are the stories you will never know if you don’t ask, so I challenge you to begin to learn about your past and attempt to tear down your own barriers.