It is the stories of family, history, and identity that brought me to create "Bloodline." It is a 22-foot long trail of history; where I came from as far back as I could trace my Native American bloodline to date. To be a citizen of the Delaware Nation you must prove a quantum of blood and trace that back through birth and death records until you match up to an ancestor’s name on the official "Dawes Rolls." As I began walking backward through the past to prove my blood, I wanted to hear and see my ancestors so that they could tell their stories. I wanted them to be counted.
The figures walk across a locust tree that a storm took down. Cut lengthwise, so it exposes the rough center and the lines, this shows the tree's history. I debarked the exterior but kept the curve of the tree and its rough surface. The tree base mounts to the wall, and the figures stand upon the top outer edge.
There are sections for each generation. The beginning is my children. Though I only have two, there are five figures. Each life is counted, and the children that did not survive to birth are remembered with a place in my family history, their forms small and their heads bowed. From that, I have my section with my sisters and brother. After that, I weave back and forth between my mother and father's family history. When hung, the gallery light casts a shadow of the figures on the back wall, representing my memory. Like a shadow, these memories are ephemeral, and in the end, we are all only a shadow in history, shadows on this earth.
I refer to the figures as Cigar Figures which come from a childhood story that my mother told of the "Stick People." The "Stick People" would run through the night and call your name. My mother never described the figures, and I wondered what the "Stick People" looked like for most of my early life. The Cigar Figures are my reimagining of those "Stick People," now a story of family and my past. The figures are made of real cigars and found sticks. I create molds of the cigars and then cast them and the sticks in bronze. The faces are of my family and ancestors.