Abusive Childhood (Runaway 1940), 2021

This work is meant to visually resemble my grandfather’s collective experience as a child living off the land to escape his home life. I will display this period of his life by using artifacts attributed to his childhood and overall means of survival. I will present his difficult upbringing with direct symbolism, iconography, and documentation. This includes and is not limited to: skulls, clothing, photographs, insects, drawings/writing, etc. While exhibiting the burden of his foundation, it is also meant to display resilience, the beauty of nature, and how we as humans decide to interact with it.

To escape their abusive alcoholic parents, my grandfather and some of his siblings ran away from home and resorted to hunting and trapping animals to survive. As a young child, hearing these stories would only register as fiction or as a fun alternative to living a normal life. It was only until after my grandfather’s death that I began to realize the severity of his upbringing. His mother left the family soon after the children ran away and was never heard from again. The same happened to one of his brothers who was presumed dead after never returning. After joining the Navy and completing his service in the Korean War, my grandfather went to school for Biology and became a teacher, and eventually a High School principal. He died of cancer in 2010, he would have been 90 this coming February 2021.