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I accepted these beliefs, along with many others, as normalities of any family but came to realize with age were unique to my presence within a working class, Appalachian culture. Folklorist Charles Joyner mentions that “folk culture embodies in its traditional chain of transmission the visions and values of the folk themselves…What remains, after forgetting everything that is not truly memorable, is something primal, something very close to the basic poetic impulse of the human species. People neither remember nor forget without reason.” Thus, in From Yonder Wooded Hill, I grapple with what we choose to remember versus what chooses to remember us. The result creates a visual narrative that juxtaposes my own heritage and that of my ancestors to show the interwoven continuum of a long-passed yet ever-present culture embedded in hills near and far to my upbringing.
As Daphne Du Maurier states in Myself When Young: “Who can ever affirm, or deny that the houses which have sheltered us as children, or as adults, and our predecessors too, do not have embedded in their walls, one with the dust and cobwebs, one with the overlay of fresh wallpaper and paint, the imprint of what has been, the suffering, the joy? We are all ghosts of yesterday, and the phantom of tomorrow awaits us alike in shadow or light, dimly perceived at times, never entirely lost.” It is this notion of ‘never entirely lost’ that drives the progression of history as a rippling entity, instead of a linear track, eager to bob to the surface whenever we choose to pay attention.