Vanessa Leroy Artist Statement

as our bodies lift up slowly

The memory goes like this: we’re standing in the hallway of our childhood home. It’s evening time, and the windowless passageway renders us unable to see our own toes grazing atop the rough carpet fibers. Our blurred eyes look upwards to the kitchen that resides at the end, and the warm orange glow of the stove light begins to illuminate the path. 

We walk into this orange light, looking down once more as our feet step over the metal guard ending the hallway carpet, transitioning into beige kitchen tile — that is where the memory ends. A twin memory, a re-memory; I share this with my brother. In this space where the truth is obscured ever so slightly, transcending the boundary of time, we met for a moment before we knew each other, before we knew what awaited us in this world.

There isn’t a lot of space for dreaming in an oppressive world, so I use photography as a tool to create worlds where I freely navigate the various facets of my life experience and identity as a black queer woman. In this body of work titled "as our bodies lift up slowly," I reflect upon my Haitian Catholic upbringing, the effects of generational trauma, and the relationships that have nurtured my growth. I weave between the past and present using archival family photographs, text, mixed media collage, and environmental portraits. 

I draw inspiration from Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred, in which the young black protagonist Dana Franklin navigates a shifting timeline to uncover truths about her family lineage. I additionally employ text from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, which follows a formerly enslaved woman named Sethe whose home is haunted by the spirit of her deceased daughter, creating a situation where she and her living daughter are constantly swallowed by the overwhelming grief of losing years of life to brutal slavery and the 

loss of a life that never got to grow.

I create photographs that speak to and comfort my younger self, and the versions of myself that struggled to carry the weight of having poor mental health and low self-esteem. In revisiting the past and imagining 

the future, I have created space for myself to heal 

in the present.