Untangling Our Matriarchs: A Fine Art Portraiture Collection
Special thanks to the keepers of the family stories: Nanny, Aunt Betty, Mom, Tia Annie, Uncle Tony, Lila, Cousin Jim, Uncle John, Grandpa Rod and Grandpa Charlie.
I would like to dedicate this work to the women who came before us. I make this in hopes of engaging in dialogue with others like me, who seek answers and connection.
What am I doing?
I am telling a story. Several stories. About myself, about my ancestresses, and about the 19th century European women who immigrated across the Atlantic, and then emigrated across the continent. What was a woman’s experience like? How have we been seen and valued through time, by both society and by our families? What positions have we been put in by history and time?
I have done a series of fine art photo shoots in collaboration with other Winnipeg artists to tell stories about the women in my family, and women like them through history. Their stories are our stories.
Luxury and Bone Collection
In this collection, I wanted to break my southern ancestresses free from being of caricatures. The tragic belle, the worried mother, the evil slave mistress, the put upon wife. I depict each of these roles in portraiture, but show a single ancestress experiencing all of them. I did so because historical records and documents demonstrate that many of these women held each of these roles at different points in their lives. They had a variety of experiences and roles, which I present here.
The Faceless Mother
Patriarchal naming conventions change a woman’s name, making it harder to trace her through historic records. These customs and laws often also stripped her of property rights, closing off yet another avenue of historical investigation. As a result, the male line can be traced easily through civil and property records. The female line cannot. I had trouble finding who these women were, tracing them through time. They literally brought all of us into existence, and yet they are much less visible than their male counterparts. It’s infuriating.
So I wanted to visually represent this, with the faceless mother. She is the Ur mother, the mother to us all.
How did this begin?
I have always been interested in my ancestry. Family history and stories were told at Thanksgiving, Easter, family visits and get togethers, and it was clear that they mattered. But the stories were by and large about the men of the family. There were huge gaps when it came to the matriarchs, beyond just this vague sense that they had existed and some had possessed some gravitas. I wanted to know who they were, where they had come from, and what they had done. Where were their stories? Answers were often sparse.
And where did our family fit into the broader society? What was our American story? When did we get here? How did we get from Europe to California, across both an ocean and a continent? And where were we when big things were going on? Where were we during the revolution? During the Civil War?
Many questions. Few answers.
When I went away to university, I attended University of California Berkeley, where I studied archaeology. I learned how to conduct archival research about the people and places in the past that mattered to me. I have put these skills to use over the years, and have filled in a lot of information about who the matriarchs of my family were, and about where people were during both peace and war.
Through extensive records searches I have pieced together a family tree going back four hundred years, with many different branches and many different kinds of people. Archival documents and photographs have been invaluable, as have the oral histories of my immediate and extended families.
I now have many answers, which in and of itself is satisfying. But what to do with those answers? What to do with the complex feelings they sometimes raise, about women’s rights, slavery, ethnic cleansing, settlement and colonialism?
I have turned them into art. Rather than just talk about them verbally, I have carefully crafted images to convey both the beauty, mundanity, strangeness and horror of these situations.
Tell me more
I am specifically telling the story of my ancestresses who migrated to what is now the United States and Canada, while also reflecting on my own story of migration and immigration. I trace two broad ancestral lines in this project: my father’s family and my mother’s family. This sounds like a simple enough task, but in fact covers over 400 years and 12 generations.
Family trees grow exponentially, with 4 grandparents leading to 8 great grandparents, 16 great great grandparents, 32 great great great grandparents etc. My direct ancestors started coming over to North America from Europe in the 1600s, leaving the Netherlands and England for the British colonies in the mid-1600s . Going back to the 1600s takes you to your 9th great grandparents (if not further), of which there are 2,048 men and women.
So.
Many.
People.
So.
Much.
Work.
I didn’t want to just plug them all into a giant pedigree chart. Rather, I wanted to know who these people were in a broader sense, especially the women. Who were they? Were they like me? In what ways? Would we have gotten along? I wanted to know what sort of life and world they lived in. In particular, I was fascinated by the women who had immigrated from Europe, and their descendants who took on their own subsequent journeys across the vast North American continent. What did that journey bring them? How did they handle it?
These photos explore those questions and bring the viewer closer to women of the past. The women of those eras could not vote, open bank accounts alone, or serve on juries. In many places in the US and Canada women were not allowed to own property until the mid-1800s, or even later. Their husbands were in charge of their assets, including cash and real estate. In 1771 New York began giving women “some say” in these matters, with other states following suit gradually over time. However their husband’s were considered the legal owners of the entire family’s assets, and did not actually have to do what they asked, even if it pertained to their wife's family heirlooms and lands. Women were treated like children in this regard.
They were not even allowed to keep their own names. These women were legally stripped of their surname at marriage, and in polite society were addressed by their husband’s full name (as say Mrs. John Bradford instead of Mrs. Sarah Bradford). They were largely excluded from civil records like the census for several generations.
But though the archival documents often don’t mention them they were definitely there, toiling away in the background. This was especially true in the 1800s, when the majority of my ancestors immigrated to North America from Europe. Since many of my ancestresses came over in the 1800s, these photos have an emphasis on that century, when most of the activity in the lines in question was going on.
These photos tell stories about their lives, about where they came from and where they ended up. They address slavery in the American South, ethnic cleansing and economic disenfranchisement by the British ruling class, and the unrecorded labour of women in the home. They also address major historical events, like the US Civil War and how such military conflicts affect those left to tend the home front. Some also look at what we would today call internal migration, focusing on the experience of settler colonialism through the viewpoint of said settlers. As a practitioner of Feminist Economic Archaeology, I examine all of these eras and events through a lens of both gender equity and socioeconomic class.
Finally, as an immigrant myself, I have thought a lot about what my role is in the system of settler colonialism. I am one in a long line of women who moved across the continent, dying hundreds, or even thousands, of miles from where I was born. Born in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1983, I left California in 2017 with my husband and young son. We traveled just over 2,000 miles, moving to the shores of Lake Superior. After a few years there we moved 380 miles north west, to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Doing this has made me think more about the journey of my ancestresses. Who were they? What did they do? What did they think? How did they see themselves? What were they fleeing from? Or to?