Fools
Gold
2022. Porcelain, bronze, copper, found photograph, found postcard, rope, fiber, embroidery hoop.
An image dictated by Grandma as the “Three Amigos” sits deeper within our album. They were gold prospectors from the other side of the family. Their knees are bent from years of hard labor and miles trekked in the Yukon. They stand straight-faced and sore-backed for their photo. This family history, and its title in our photo album, is a product of “Settler Theory” and remains a part of the pervasive harm that stems from the colonization of people, culture, and land in the Americas. It's something the silver screen of Hollywood frequently depicts and glorifies. Today we have reality series, such as “Gold Rush,” that bring the entertainment of prospecting and dispossession straight to our living room.
How do we create modern accountability for our histories? How can we treat our histories as a lesson? What does it look like to critique them? I went searching with these questions in the creation of my work, “Fool’s Gold.” I knew if I wanted to chew on the gendered history of the West, I had to understand the beginning of the colonization of bodies and land across the Western world.
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In the work, “Fool’s Gold,” a found photograph of a cowgirl harkens back to my family’s photograph of the prospectors. This cowgirl replaces the men as a way to insert myself into the confrontation of the questions at play. I am a product of the rewards of their prospecting. It feels easy to distance oneself when looking at faded, unfamiliar faces and hearing their stories told by your father on the other side of the phone line. This cowgirl also stands as a representation of the lesser talked about histories, experiences, and impact of and by women on the prairie.
The embroidery is a fragment of women's work. The stitched bouquets are drawn from wallpaper remnants in a house within the ghost town of St. Elmo, a former gold mining camp. It punctures a found National Park postcard, advertising an expansive world of adventure to tourists. On the reverse is a handwritten note for loved ones back home about a woman’s travels. The crushed velvet the postcard is stitched to reckons back to the thick velvet used in making Spanish war saddles, from which western saddles evolved. Doll hands rest outstretched to the ground, as though they were about to dig into the soil. One is a manufactured porcelain hand. The other is cast in bronze, reminiscent of gold and the infamous fool’s gold, pyrite. Through it, the glittering treasure becomes the body.