Kathryn  Cellerini Moore​

During the process of creating the artworks in the series Ruby Boots I visited the farmland in rural Oregon where I grew up. Dressed as Dorothy with blue and white gingham and magical ruby boots, I pulled a wagon of yellow bricks along the property to pay homage to the place I consider as the foundation of my yellow brick road. Images of this gesture were captured by photograph in key places on the property where I could recall a specific memory and where I felt an emotional attachment. These places included the platform where my house burned down, to the fence where my family would shoot at tin cans. While working with the photos in the studio I asked myself how the remaining homestead compared to my memory of it. How did my memories of the homestead change over time? How does my brain decide which memories are important to keep and which to discard or skew and how does that effect the artwork? For example, some of the close-up detail images in the landscape were not immediate references to a memory but they still elicited a strong sense of nostalgia and ownership.

In addition to photographs, each artwork in the Ruby Boots series contains a drawing. For me, the drawings in this series represent both imagined landscapes and self-portraits. Texture, line, color, and depth create an illusory space that is purely imagined yet subconsciously influenced by places I have been (such as my childhood farm) and emotions elicited by that place. In other words, the drawings simultaneously describe each space and how I feel about that space. They describe what the yellow bricks alone cannot. For me, the combination of Oz references and abstract landscapes offer a more holistic (but still incomplete) representation of just how formative the early experiences on the farm truly were.