strike that match

Artist Statement

The space you’re standing in now, along with this piece of paper and the objects around it, are the result of the previous four months spent excavating the memories of a home and those who passed through it.

In my seventh year, I found myself in a new shared space. It began as four bodies, four lives intertwined. Over the course of a decade, that four-top party unraveled and reformed. New people arrived. Life shifted. What began as a home gradually evolved into something else.

Yet still today, I hold the belief that that space was truly alive during those initial years. I can picture the early morning light pouring in as the four of us gathered around a round wooden table beneath my grandfather’s handmade stained-glass light fixture, watching each other’s hands tear open colorfully wrapped papers.

Deeper into my tenure living at that house, new people arrived and the early morning celebrations would change. My grandmother’s hand-stitched quilts, filled with color, the ones that kept us safe and warm, would also witness passionate hands rip apart the wrappers of condoms.

And then, just beyond the twenty-five hundredth day, I struck a match and set that space on fire.