Taylor Finke

Harsh Words from Our Mothers

I am a woman raised by women. In my work, I retrace and reconstruct my family history—about which I know very little—through fabricated images, family photographs, and found documents with a focus on matriarchal lineage and female identity. The images I make reference the somewhat traditional versions of femininity and womanhood that I was taught by my mother and grandmother while often also challenging them and creating feelings of tension. I investigate my past as well as my present relationship with my mother, and how these things have affected my own understandings of womanhood, motherhood, and relationships.

The images, often created using family heirlooms in my mother’s home, serve as an attempt to reconstruct my personal history and to act as a record of the past while also documenting the present. The work combines still lives drawn from memories that reference themes of femininity and domesticity with altered family photographs. I utilize found documents that, in particular, have some significant relationship to my own personal history. These images and documents come together to construct a visual family history that functions not simply as documentation, but rather as a piecing together of things that I know, things that I think I know, and things that might remain a mystery to me.