artwork > An Olive and an Oak

This body of work developed after my Fulbright Fellowship in Greece. In response to being an American (oak) in Greece (olive), I thought a lot about how one understands, interprets, and navigates another culture, another history. Part of this work was a metaphor: "the process of translation" was taking a recipe for brining olives as told by a Greek olive vendor at the market, in Greek, and then translating the directions and trying to understand through doing. Part of the work was learning about the history of Thessaloniki through oral stories, and observation - noticing what history was important by which monuments they chose to preserve.