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ABSTRACT The inspiration and impetus for this artwork and thesis began when I was growing up, when I was regularly asked if I had any aboriginal or Dutch ancestors, a question which always left me dumbfounded. Yet this recurring experience made me curious about my ancestry, and I began to inquire about my family history. I soon learned from my mother that her mother was sold into servitude by her parents; after being continually mistreated by her “owners,” she escaped and was adopted by another family. Since I resembled my maternal grandmother, I figured that she would be the best place to begin my investigation into my ancestry, but she died before I had made much progress, thereby severing an irreplaceable link with my origins. The difficulty of my task was compounded by the family history of dementia, but I was determined to continue probing into my roots, in the hopes of piecing together a genealogy, both to satisfy my own curiosity and that of my descendants.The many stories I heard from my mother have had a deep influence on my understanding of the family history. My mother’s relationship with her mother was quite complex and stormy. My maternal grandmother adored my mother, but was also overprotective and highly controlling. Having myself raised a son and a daughter, I discovered a type of special relationship with my daughter which is hard to put into words, and which at times manifests as contradiction and conflict. Thus I was motivated to delve into the nature of this relationship, with the expectation that doing so will bring increased understanding and reduced tension. My approach to investigating the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship has been deeply influenced by the work of the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir, especially his 1949 book The Second Sex. I inherited from my mother a fondness for and skill in textile work, especially embroidery, for which the trees grown by my family serve as the primary motif. The first piece in this embroidery series is titled Reclustered and features the plants which have played a prominent role in my family, the branches of which hold a part of my own story. The second piece, Stacked Butterflies, uses the relationship between a butterfly and the natural environment to interpret the intense and entangling nature of the mother-daughter relationship. In this thesis I use a combination of art and text to record my family history, fashioning stories and memories into a kind of reconstructed family tree, as a way of deepening our understanding of the mother-daughter relationship.
Keywords: family memory; mother-daughter relationship; computerized embroidery
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