Margaret Withers

Migration

This series is an artistic exploration of human migration. Conceptually, I'm interested in accessing the emotional landscape of my migratory childhood, excavating it, sifting through it from the remove of adulthood, without sentimentality but maybe just a hint of nostalgia, and representing that visually against the Texas landscape as seen through the eyes of my child-self, and how I might convey the ability children have to make themselves large by acts of imagination in order to apprehend the world, make it smaller, and experience it without hostility or fear. My father worked for different Texas oil companies in the 1970's and 80's, and because of the nature of the work, every two or three years my family was uprooted, moved across county lines, and resettled--from Hays County to El Paso County, then to Nueces, Harris, and Bexar Counties. Creating stories for myself became my way of processing the changes I experienced. I cast myself as an old woman drawing water with bucket from a lake (a bathtub pond in our back yard) and trudging back to the house; I was a hobo biding my time on the train tracks waiting for the empty box car that would carry me to my next destination;  To be sure, most children cultivate some kind of imaginary existence in which they are the adults, conducting their own lives as they see fit, in order to keep those real feelings of powerlessness at bay. In adolescence, when my fears revolved around making new friends and fitting in, I saw moving as a chance at a fresh start, unencumbered by past social blunders. The work I’ve done so far depicts the emotional landscape of my childhood as I remember it - a blur of color and movement flashing by the static iconography of the past.