Born a girl in the mountains
beech Creek, NC
digital collage, 2021
This piece is a self portrait of an imagined scene from my childhood. The quilt and shoes I still have in a box and the pants with large cuffs I took from photo references. The army jeep was purchased by my father before I was born because he was convinced that I would be a boy. The faded photograph in the quilt features my great aunt Addie with a large plow horse used to plow the corn fields. She was one of my grandfathers five sisters. She was born with very poor eyesight and wore very thick glasses.
I remember the tilt of her head as she listened, the slight crack and twang of her voice, the strength and dexterity of her arthritic fingers. She was the most cheerful of my aunts - joyful seems the right word. It was aunt Addie who taught me to skip and told me how much she loved to skip when she was a girl - it made long trips to the barn or field quicker and more fun. The weight of being born a girl in Appalachia was much lighter in the 1970s than it was in the 1920s.
Goin’ Vistin’
Dry Creek, NC
digital collage, 2021
Virgie Crisp of Dry Creek, Stecoah Township. Virgie was known for being able to spit further than any man I ever knew and though her hair was silver turned a cartwheel at the drop of a hat.
Sundays were often reserved for visitin’. After church services and dinner were over the older generation (many who were shut ins) would open their doors or sit out on the porch or even drag a bunch of chairs under the shade tree. The younger generation with children and the ramblers would drive up and down the creeks to visit. Sometimes you would pull up and hang yourself out of the truck window and jaw and sometimes you would get out and sit awhile and occasionally you were invited to stay for supper. We visited Virgie and her husband, Bart, many Sundays.
Longing for home
Beech Creek, NC
digital collage, 2021
William Bryson Williams and Evie Roberts Williams expanded the Williams homestead into a large holding on the head of Beech Creek. With little more than a plow, a logging truck and a moonshine still they raised and sent out into the world eleven children most of whom moved to the NC piedmont region to work in the textile mills.
Willie and Evie (Mama and Papa) held the center of their large family together by providing a place for their myriad of grandchildren and great grandchildren to return to during holidays and vacations. The family held together because there was a place to return to.
I have chosen this piece as the seedbed for my Senior Thesis project as it expresses the present germ of my geobiography.
biochemical intern
pensacola, FL
digital collage, 2020
Ty Benton, a Georgia Tech chemical engineering student at his first summer internship working for Monsanto in Pensacola, Florida, 1960.
Ty grew up on a sharecrop farm in Alabama and put himself through college alternating semesters of work and classes. After graduation he took a job at the Ecusta Paper Mill and moved his young family to Brevard, NC.
This piece does not neatly fit within this project but I include it because it is my first digitally collaged portrait and the piece where I began developing the techniques used throughout this project. I scanned a damaged and torn vintage photograph and layered in creative commons images. I tried to capture Ty’s sense of wonder as well as his interest in science nature.