Are you local?

This self-portrait draws from a social media post about a population of wild, non-native parakeets that has supposedly established itself near Bluffton, South Carolina. I depict myself holding a peach, a fruit closely associated with the neighboring state of Georgia but cultivated even more prevalently here, in South Carolina, as one of the parakeets feeds from it. The pencil in my hand identifies me not only as the subject of the portrait, but as the artist, placing me both within this landscape and in the position of observing and interpreting it. At the center of this work is a question I have been asked often. "Are you local?" What does it mean to be “from” a place, and is that the same thing as belonging there? I was born in the South Carolina Lowcountry, but my relationship with the place I come from is more complicated than birthplace. The parakeets offer an interesting inversion of that experience. They are not native to this landscape, yet they have adapted to it, established a community, and thrived. Through exaggerated color, distortion, and compressed space, I blur the boundaries between myself, the bird, the fruit, and the landscape. The cultivated peach, the introduced parakeet, and I, a native-born artist, all inhabit an environment that has already been shaped by generations of human intervention. Even the deliberately artificial details of my own appearance, particularly the brightly colored fake nails wrapped around the peach, complicate the division between what is natural and what is constructed. The artificial becomes part of the figure just as introduced species and cultivated plants become part of a landscape. I am interested in the tension between being native and belonging, and in the question of whether our relationship to a place is determined by where we originate, how we adapt, what we change, or the ways we make a place our own. By turning the landscape inward through self-portraiture, I am considering not only the ways people shape the places they inhabit, but the ways those places shape our identities and our understanding of where we belong.