Address Book

‘Address Book’ is a 48×72 mixed media created on canvas with vintage maps, enhanced acrylic paint, spray paint, and oil stick.

‘Address Book’ tells the story of our family’s moves across different cities, towns, and states. With each address change, every new home we purchased, we mailed postcards to our family and friends updating our new address and phone numbers. It became a familiar cycle, one marking not only a change of location but also the physical representation of our family’s evolution over time. At one point, it seemed like every new house came with a new baby born and then evolved into each move coinciding with a child leaving the nest.

Most of the maps are from my father’s stash, some from the 70s and 80s, with his handwritten notes on distance and time. Before the days of GPS, we navigated by maps, atlases, and TripTiks from AAA, marking our route with highlighter pens. Those maps were more than just travel guides; they were our lifelines, helping us plot each move, each journey. The colors on the maps now reflect that same sense of movement, a reminder of the many places we’ve called home.

The area codes and city names embedded in the artwork represent our addresses, each one a chapter of our story. From Texas to Tennessee to Wisconsin and moving back again, we drove across the country, and those streaks across the maps redefined our sense of home. In this very personal piece, I tried to balance every corner, every color, every line with movement. Movement across the country, movement from home to home, movement through the years. The vibrant tones mirror the excitement, the chaos, and sometimes the uncertainty of starting over. But there’s beauty in the change, in the process of creating a new home wherever we land, and in each address that finds its way into our address book.

Each time we moved, the circumstances definitely had their own unique challenges, but the change was also filled with exploration of new places, new people, and new memories. We always found our way. And, as we look back at all the places we’ve lived, our Address Book is a map of who we are.