Madeline Murphy

When my father was my age, he too left everything behind and moved to a new country. I see his footsteps on the pavement ahead. With this project, I investigated my own absence and presence: Has my room changed at all? Do my siblings miss me? A distance unfurls between who I’ve been – memories heavy like landmarks on my neighborhood streets, dreams that line the walls of my now empty childhood bedroom – and who I’m becoming – the paradise of uncertainty that I’ve claimed as mine.  

This nostalgic investigation led me to thinking about the fantastical worlds my siblings and I would invent: the castles we ruled and the dragons we fought. The truth was veiled, and we escaped reality on the backs of our imaginations. By reflecting on the essence of my childhood, I am stitching together a patchwork of my own existence, a fractured and shifting mass of memory. I created a character that exists as a protector within my childhood dreams, and a meditation on my father’s journey mirrored in my own.