Every person is at the center of their own existence; each is also intimately dependent upon and related to all others. Our personality is molded by an interaction of our inherited nature and the environment. Our background, a collection of particular cultural values, memories of pivotal points, experiences, and people, shape the way we view the world, influence our patterns, decisions, and are a part of what we call our identity.

Are we then no more than an ongoing assemblage of what used to be or what should have been- an accumulation of unresolved questions and trauma? Do our cumulative experiences define who we eventually become? Is our journey who we are? And if our identity is circumscribed by the journey, is it anchored by the landmarks or the times in between?

Birthdays, weddings, divorces, travel, first dates are clear landmarks; pivotal points in our timeline, often accompanied by rituals to help us transition. We tend to take pictures of significant moments and people we like, accumulate souvenirs and send postcards from places that we visit.

But there are also quiet, barely possible to pinpoint, moments in which shifts happen: during ordinary daily rituals, the heartaches we do not mention, the blink of an eye bliss that we wish had never ended. There is not always a way to mark those moments in time. Yet, something changes and all we are left with is a feeling, and then a memory of a feeling.

The work here is a collection of many of these invisible pivotal points. They are souvenirs I have collected on my journey through time and space to my current self. They are symbols that stand for walks alone in the rain, for the voyagers that I have met, for stolen childhoods, for emotional labor that holds walls together, for daily rituals, for the past, for transition, for abandonment, for separation, for the heaviness of the lugging.