Ancestral Light features components of a larger body of work about generations of female labor in my family. Here, symbols, text and images drawn from the lives of my mother and my great-grandmother are manifested via the materials and processes of the blue collar part of my life as a union apprentice sign painter. Reclaimed, printed vinyl banners are hand-painted, telling a family history of cattle and evergreen farming, horticulture and botanical illustration.

The works in Ancestral Light suggest what might be present in each woman, what sort of characteristics, values, experiences and ways of seeing the world can be identified as specifically ours. I’ve chosen to highlight this inquiry through our labor history in order to pay homage to those characteristics that are so often dismissed in women: grit, tenacity, ambition, and intelligence.