Wayfaring

2013-2017

The images in Wayfaring refer to the external journey of exploring the wilderness, beginning the search for homeland and identity.

In Wayfaring, I use self-portraits and models as surrogates to explore what it means to seek a new homeland after leaving the culture of my youth. As a woman brought up in the Unification Church, commonly remembered as the Moonies cult, my personhood was subsumed in the larger needs of the cult. At twenty, after being forced to marry a stranger, I finally fought my way out.

In this project I wanted to explore the idea of losing one’s home, both physically and metaphorically. In the cult we had a concept of the homeland that our faith would build, the Cheon Il Guk, which translates from Korean as “the sovereign Kingdom of God.” By leaving the group, I was barring my physical and spiritual self both from the home of my family and the future home of the God I had known.

By placing myself, and models as surrogates, alone in the landscape, I wanted to depict both the beauty and the pain of that solitude. Although many of the figures appear lost and poorly prepared for the environments around them, I wanted to celebrate the strength and resilience that brought them there - and finally to depict a reclamation of self in the process.