Grammy's Praying For Me

Project Description:

Grammy's Praying For Me

If a home is where we become. What happens when we don’t fit?

With a family that represents something I could never become, I search for an image of what family can look like outside of the binary.

My research starts with the objects, photographs, writings, fabrics, and artworks that are left from my childhood. I draw parallels between what is found and what is remembered in order to better understand my own relationship with gender and sexuality. By knowing what I was shown I can make sense of my inner child. A baby raised a girl, who never grew up to become a woman. I begin to understand what didn't fit right.

What didn't fit right was woman.

What didn't fit right was straightness.

So I chose my own family. And I know now that there is room for both what I was given and what I have chosen.

Artist Statement:

My name is Maddie Swainhart and my upbringing in a heteronormative, nuclear, Southern American household provided an extremely limited view of what my future could look like.

For young Maddie, who had so much care to give, but couldn’t see any caring characters who looked liked them.

You are my muse.

My practice revolves around research and construction. I research the archetypes of the Mother, the Nuclear Family, and what nurturing looks like, while constructing a queered image of those. I wonder what family could look like outside the binary, considering the question ‘Can we all mother?’

The tension between found footage and performance highlights the gaps between my utopian understanding of motherhood and the Mother figure you saw growing up. My use of self portraiture allows me to shift between fantasy and reality and emphasize the expectation of gender roles within domesticity, while giving you your own playground of The Home.