SAFE
As someone who has moved often (and currently has no immediate family within 800 miles), I have been grieving my present lack of rootedness. In the process, I began thinking of where I have felt the most familiar and secure in my life, and realized that my grandparents' farm in Carrollton, Georgia was the most consistent and safest place I have ever known. This past summer, my mother's generation made the (probably inevitable) decision to sell the farm. I was not able to revisit it before the sale, but was transported there in a million ways when I opened a random UPS box of my inheritance and pulled out one of my Grandma's battered ancestral quilts used as packing material around fragile vases. In a weird way, this one quilt made me feel my roots more than I had in years. This experience led me to explore my mental connection to rootedness through quilts. As I examined the themes of familiarity, security, and comfort, I wanted to use materials that embrace the serene – yet, also highlight the fickle nature of safety. Encaustic seemed like a natural fit, as it has a somewhat ethereal quality, but is not completely in my control. Vellum and Dura-lar also create a similar aesthetic and quality of light, and were simple choices for developing color studies. The patterning in these images is borrowed from security envelope insides that I noticed and collected from my work office. These pieces are an invitation to stop and appreciate what brings the fleeting feeling of safety and home in a world that is possibly neither safe nor home.