Eileen's Daughters
As the studio assistant to artist Lisa C Soto I learned the importance of collecting materials that one feels called too, even if you don't know what you will do with it.
In 2021 I began collecting brown eggshells when living in Los Angeles. Something about those brown chicken eggs that I felt connected too. Maybe it was because my mother was going through cancer, we just scraped by the pandemic, or that from 2019 onward, in my late twenties, I finally understood the fragility of life.
I felt like I was walking on eggshells and the women around me shared they too felt like they were walking on eggshells.
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Naturally, as a performance artist I thought, "how can I take walking on eggshells to the next level...how could visally express that feeling on my body?"
Later in 2022, a year in a half later, a month before my MFA program, I made my first Fragility Form. A sculpture made of eggshells and paper, creating a flowly like form.
Once I started graduate school I finally had the space to test out an idea I had when I first began collecting the eggshells. I was going to make a Fragility Suit out of pantyhose and eggshells.
After I assembled this suit together, I hung it up on my wall for about two weeks. I thought it was beautiful, and it looked like a sculpture. Then one day I decided to put that suit on. Once on, a few of the eggshells were still intact, and I began moving. I first started doing my meditative movements, intuitive, repetitive movements, that I have done for several years now. But it didn't feel right. And in an impulse decision, I decided to walk into the wall and crush the remaining eggshells on the suit.
It felt like I was releasing with every crunch and every link I heard from the shells breaking off my body and onto the floor. This became my Fragility Performance, where I acknowledge my fragility and allow myself to break apart.
Unraveling fragility deeper, I decided to focus on the fragility I felt as a daughter. My MFA thesis examined the female identity through the lens of daughthood. Interviewing 40 women throughout the country, I discovered this common delicate thread we were all connected by: our daughter identity. My thesis proposed that we learn how to become women through our daughterhood. The way we are raised as daughters and our role as daughters influence our identity as women.
Thinking about my role as the eldest daughter and the responsibility I inherited and accepted (becoming the guardian of my younger sisters) I found that I was walking on a fragile line between motherhood and daughterhood. Unraveling the similarities of daughters and mothers led me to find a deeper meaning in my Fragility Series.
Including my sisters became essential to this work as I thought about how fragile our bond is. Even though we are siblings, I discovered that we must treat each other like we are fragile and our bond is sacred. Instead of walking into a wall after putting the suit on, we hug each other first and then walk into a wall together.
