Little Girls

This series deals with themes and issues with childhood trauma. This trauma is based on my personal experience with my father being domestically abusive when I was young. 

I am a trauma survivor and saying that in this case, writing it still feels weird and wrong to say. I will try and write it as simply as you can define an experience that defines you. My father was physically and emotionally abusive. I guess that is as simple as I can put it, devoid of specifics and so on. Trauma can be seen as “A thing which has not been understood inevitably reappears; like an unlaid ghost it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell broken” which I think is an adequate description. 

I tried to express that in my work both within recreated scenarios and emotional states. The hiding under the bed which is the second photo in my sequence is taken from my memories of hiding under the bed from my father. The stuffed animals are somewhat stand ins for my siblings who experienced this with me. I didn’t want the series to feel repetitive so I varied between how close I got to my subject in each photograph. I feel like working through this and looking at my life has become another way of healing from this abuse.