Grounded Series Description. When I returned to Klein in 2018, I was taken aback by the miles of cotton fields that flow around the homes and outbuildings outside of Harpersville. The fluffy white of the mature cotton was like snow covering the terrain. Over the past several years, I have been exploring my own relationship to a heritage formed by cotton. My parents and I never owned land with cotton, but cotton was the foundation on which the generations before flourished. I slowly came to the realization that I was part of the brutal dehumanizing colonialism that continues to bloom today. My romanticized view of antebellum life fell away.
Codex: Map of my childhood was inspired by the 2019 exhibit Mapping Memory: Space and History in 16th Century Mexico at the Blanton Museum in Austin. These Mapas de las Relaciones Geograficas were created by Indigenous artists at the behest of the Spaniards around 1580 and incorporated an amalgamation of imagery and symbols from their culture and from the colonizers. I was especially taken with the use of footprints moving along paths showing landmarks.
This map of my childhood includes footprints between places in my world of the 1950s when my summer life revolved around our antebellum family house Klein, my best friend’s house and her family’s antebellum house, the swimming hole, and the church. These antebellum structures were in disrepair. One would later be torn down and the other preserved. The resulting 4 x 6’ canvas couples the mapmaking tradition of Mapas with a childlike folk-art representation. The brown pigment is dirt from my childhood friend’s cotton field. Footprints mark my daily routes. Cotton forms a sea around the buildings, crossing the highways, just as I saw it in 2018.