am i another you?
I begin with a question, ill-formed and incomplete. I could say I’ve spent my life searching for the answer surrounding the nature of my birth, but with hindsight, the truth is unclear. What I can say for certain is that for the last five years, I’ve been beset by a quandary of the heart, mind, and soul. Pulsating at the center are questions of my identity. I am compelled to explore my history and reinterpret my past.
On my birth certificate are the names of my parents, though the name of my social father stands in opposition to my genealogy. The script of his signature conceals my birth as donor conceived (DC). The truth of my origin would lay dormant for years behind his scrawl, burying my true heritage beneath the stories of my social father’s ancestry.
Learning the truth in March of 2019, I began to slowly reevaluate my identity. Searching for myself along waterways, I was drawn to the Platte River, to its braids and channels, to the whispers carried on the wind, and to the stories buried in the sand.
The Platte River is a braided river. Between the North and South Platte, it travels over a thousand miles from its headwaters to feed into the Missouri River. Much like the river, I, too, am twisted and turned into being, woven of social and biological threads.
As I searched for myself, I clung to the river, to a song of water and light, for safety and reassurance. I explored the shores of the Platte River as if by knowing its sandbars, flora, and fauna, I would come to know myself. In searching the land, I found traces of people. In those marks, I found a longing within myself to know and be known.
This longing directed me home to face the idea of my family as evolving and ever-changing. At the time of my birth, donor conception was already a common practice, but it was often seen as shameful. Perspective parents went to fertility clinics in secret, hiding the truth from everyone they knew. This atmosphere created and perpetuated family dynamics based on hidden truths.
After meeting my biological father and half-siblings, I find my family can no longer be defined by a traditional structure. It is a web built by donation, longing, and desire. I have a father, a father figure, a mother, a twin, three full siblings by blood, and thirteen (known) half-siblings. It is a beautiful evolving tree, altering and adapting as we welcome more siblings and relatives into the fold.
Exploring ideas of kinship, I collaborate with my family, viewing our bodies as evidence of lineage. Texture and form become important clues to remnants of past generations. I photograph hands and limbs, looking for myself as I question the influence of nature and nurture. My mother’s hands have become a symbol in my work. Her hands are my hands. I look so much like my mother’s past, and as I age, I become her present. As she ages, she becomes her mother. This line is constant, changing and adapting, we remain a force through time.
In collaborating, we build our idea of kinship together. By lying on the earth and touching heads, we compare our physical and emotional similarities and differences. The act of placing our cheeks side by side becomes an intimate ritual. We listen to the breath of one another, focusing only on the connection between mother and daughter, sister and sister, half-sibling and half-sibling. As we do so, we create a space where we can accept each other for all that we are and all that we are not.
The photographs in the exhibition are divided into two categories, landscape and people. Large-scale photographs of land and water at 32 × 40” situate the viewer along the river. Printed on delicate Japanese Washi paper, they hang from thin pieces of maple wood. Floating off the wall, the images appear to breathe in response to the viewer's movement, speaking to the impermanence of life. In contrast, life-sized portraits of my family are framed at 20 x 24”. These images reveal my physical and emotional connection to my kin. At 11 x 14”, photographs of my hands, my mother’s hands, and my father’s hands reinforce the idea of connection and disruption. There is a giving and taking, a loss and abundance. This duality represents the experience of many donor-conceived persons (DCP). I have experienced great joy at being welcomed into an extended, evolving family, but those feelings are also accompanied by sadness and grief over the loss of the familial story I grew up reciting. The framed photographs are unglazed to echo the tenderness of the imagery and emphasize the materiality of the paper, reinforcing the vulnerability of the work.
Growing closer to my kin has led me to consider the stories we’ve been told our whole lives. In questioning them, I create my own stories reimagining my birth along the water, weaving together the Platte River and my body through imagery and text within a handmade book. In contrast, the book offers a more intimate, private experience of viewing the photographs. Fictional prose lies hidden beneath tipped-in photographs, echoing the vernacular of the family photo album.
Once found, the stories direct the viewer into a space where truth and fiction are blurred. Some stories are highly fictional, based on fantasy and myth-making with elements of truth, while others offer a more truthful view of events based on my life and my mother's life. These stories skirt the line between imagination and reality, dreaming and memory. My birth is depicted multiple times along different bodies of water, encouraging the viewer to question what is real. Through this, I rewrite my story and reconstruct my history. In doing so, I interrupt the myth of family and question the secrecy of donor conception.