We carry embodied traces that are connective threads tying us to settings of our past. Lucy Lippard writes about our attachment to place as a “geographical component of a psychological need to belong.”  In the work I Carry My Belonging, threads jumble, nest-like within eggshell-thin plaster casts of a pair of lower legs and feet. The colors of the threads correlate to specific materials in my family home that my bare feet had walked over. I have physical memories of their sensations underfoot; the cool red brick of the living room floor, gray concrete when you stepped out the sliding glass doors, brown tones of wood, prickly and damp green grass, the sand colored pebbly patio …these are tactile remembrances of a home. The threads stream out behind the feet, tied to and wrapped around many brass house keys, whose weight is dragging behind as if a shadow. The lower legs angle forward giving the impression of motion, of walking, and the muscular calves give a sense of the burden that they are pulling and metaphorically carrying. There is the implication of a journey, possibly through difficulty or loss as the feet appear to have walked through ash, as it coats their bottoms and seeps up through the toes and into the creases of the ankles. 

The feet carry reminders of a place of memory, and pull the weight of severed connections and keys as totemic items of belonging. The wrapped keys indicate a preciousness, and care for the contents of these bound mummies or cocoons of thread. Time is a material in the work, evident in the excessive wrapping indicating the importance of these tokens and what they represent. This wrapping that I engage in is a form of a personal ritual, and a manifestation of my desire to preserve my sense of attachment and belonging.