Mawmaw and Pawpaw’s House

This soft sculpture combines cyanotype and a hand-drawn layout of my grandparents’ home, reconstructed from memory. The surface is stitched with the phrase I use to refer to that place, Mawmaw and Pawpaw’s house, embedding language into the object as both identification and personal shorthand.

The act of stitching through the plush form disrupts the image beneath it, physically hindering the viewer’s ability to fully read the layout. The thread pulls and distorts the surface, obscuring parts of the drawing while leaving loose ends that extend outward. These gestures act as both interruption and extension, emphasizing how memory is not fixed, but fragmented and incomplete.

The house depicted is not an exact representation, but a reconstruction shaped by time and distance, how I remember the space, how I remember the front and back yard, and how those memories have shifted. Through cyanotype’s reduction into blue tonalities and the physical interference of stitching, the work explores how memory is preserved, altered, and translated over time.