My Mother Speaks of Land As Memory

My practice is currently evolving as I work to understand the link between identity, land, home and memory. I utilize photography, writing, and sound in order to examine ‘home’ as myth through meditations of my parent’s relationships to their respective lands – my father the dry desertscape of Texas, my mother the lush watery island world of Puerto Rico. My interest lies in the intersections of these mediums and how the three can work together as spiritual trinity to create an experiential memory-scape.

The idea of home is a strong one, embedded in the psyche as something idealistic - a place to long for, or strive towards, or rally behind within cultural, spiritual, and political identities. Often, this becomes an entire identity, taken over by the need to create a space entirely of one’s own. So then, what happens to the self when the idealization of home is connected to a sense of identity and inevitably the myth comes into question?

This questioning has led me to where I am now; exploring the land, the earth, and my memories to understand where and what I consider to be home. It was only upon returning to the place of my birth, that I realized home is an idealization and amalgamation of every single memory and experience we choose to cling to. Home exists as a myth would; as powerful, repeated, collective affirmation. Through the combining of images, text and sound, my work perceives home as existing in the space between reality and abstraction.

My current project My Mother Speaks of Land as Memory was born through loss – lost land, lost identity, and the loss of past and future selves for my father, my mother, and me. Deeply embedded within this grief for unlived lives, I am creating a memory-scape that becomes more and more fluid with each new viewing. The images change, flow, and adapt to the world around me and within me while sound and text keeps me grounded in the earth as a stable place to identify as home.

Ariana Gomez

Images of a Nation As It Is And of All That It Could Be

New York Times Arts