Year One
The Year One series is based on one year’s worth of data collected about my daughter’s first year of life. From January 18, 2015 to January 18, 2016, I tracked the times of each nursing session, pumping session, nightly sleep and morning wake-up, daytime nap, diaper, bath, bottle, and solid food acceptance. My process began with hand-dyeing samples of wool, scanning the samples and adjusting them into digital files, and then arranging the “tiles” into blanket-like digital compositions.Year One visualizes the absolute time commitment that goes into being a primary caregiver. Every hour of the day with an infant is busy, and with this project, each hour is also accounted for. I can compare my daughter’s first month of life to the last month of her first year, which shows a drastic difference in feeding and sleeping routines.
Home Work
Home Work is a multidisciplinary design project that presents the overwhelming nature of the invisible labor of trying to maintain both professional and personal obligations during a global pandemic. In fall 2020, I began creating design projects about my time teaching, working, and parenting from home. My worlds merged more than I would have liked them to during that time. I created data visualizations that illustrate the overlap of my work time, time spent with my daughter, time spent making dinner and doing laundry, work meeting times, and my daughter’s virtual kindergarten time.
73 Jerks
Created in 2011, this project is about particularly negative memories. I have a really excellent memory and I just can’t seem to shake the names and faces of people I so wish I could forget. The jerks in this volume include former best friends, boyfriends, coworkers, neighbors, coaches, and classmates. In order to be included, the jerk must have had some sort of relationship with me—in other words, there are no anonymous jerks like those I’ve encountered while driving in Northern Virginia traffic, for example. These are people who I knew and whom knowingly did me wrong in some way.