Coming Clean

For my piece, One Thousand, Eight Hundred and Twenty I wanted to create an installation resembling the carpet my father purchased when I was five years old. Due to his procrastination, my father never unrolled the new beige carpet for our living room. I lived with the rolled up carpet for five years. For one hundred, eight hundred and twenty days it served as visual reminder of separation, alcoholism and neglect.
The process of making this piece is a step toward letting of the memory of a rolled up carpet being a visual trigger to negative aspects of my childhood. The labor behind this project is a significant element for me. I am putting in the effort and time to finally unravel the object that haunted our household for so long. By presenting one thousand, eight hundred and twenty small rolled up carpet pieces in a pile, I hope to convey the overwhelming amount of time the carpet remained as a stationary object. The process of cutting the carpet into pieces and creating something aesthetically different from its original form parallels my evolution of being able to move on and use these memories as creative fuel for my work.
It is important for me to re-visit visual images from my past in order to deal with their associations and overcome the emotional impact that still resonates with me. I hope to demonstrate that addressing negative associations by turning them into creative pieces can be a useful step in the healing process.