Tori Sprankle
studio art // tsprankle.wixsite.com/torisprankleart // @torisprankleartGirlhood
Girlhood is a project born of feeling sorry for my younger self; I want to pick her up, hold her, tell her things will work out eventually. As an artist, I’ve always been drawn to the self-portrait. In a sense, Girlhood is a self-portrait. It’s a space: you can enter, sit, walk around, flit through the books on the bedside table and peek inside the medicine cabinet. Each object the viewer encounters is handmade or altered to be something entirely new. It is both a place frozen in time and a place that never existed to begin with.
I have often found myself focused on subjects with a quality of intimacy. Things rarely spoken about, but often reflected upon in our own consciousness. I spend my time creating an archive of my thoughts and memories, taking photos, or writing poetry. I catalog moments through collected scraps: receipts, wrappers, old tee shirts. I often feel like a historian when I work. An archivist, uncovering the mysteries of my own life.
Ultimately, I long for this project to be more than an image of myself. Although it’s self- portraiture, I don’t think these experiences are unique to me. Girlhood is something we all experience – it’s all encompassing and ever-present, even in adulthood. Ten years later and the girl I was still lives within me, feeling each experience that was felt then.
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