Marilyn Boatwright

They gets it honest

BFA, Massachusetts College of Art and Design

Spring 2020

They gets it honest

For the past five years I have left college in the northeast to return home to Florida twice a year, once in the winter and once in the summer, and the differences between where I now call home and where I used to call home grow deeper every visit. After we all left my childhood home when I went to college in 2015, my parents began a pattern of moving from apartment to apartment and job to job. The instability of being unable to end the patterns of drug addiction and mental illness that intensified when I was in highschool, led me to leave home in the first place but, are recently becoming out of control. When I go back to Florida, old feelings I thought I escaped, begin to swallow me up again. My rapid growth from thriving in a supportive new environment becomes more abrasive to my parents who are spiraling downward. Their refusal to recognize there is a problem makes it harder to stay home and harder to leave them behind. Their behavior has cost them many relationships and even other family members and I can’t bear to let my parents be alone. Once in the winter and once in the summer, I begin a pilgrimage home and navigate through all of this all over again.

Last year, I began to take pictures when I was home with my family for the first time. When I returned home to my new college, MassArt in Boston, with the pictures I’d taken and handfuls of images plucked from scrapbooks I began my current project. This current work “they get it honest” focuses on my relationship to my family after leaving for college and what it means to return home to a dysfunctional family after learning how to make it on your own. This work uses multiple photographic processes to express psychological space. When taken in as a whole the images make connections between memories, time, and how photography has always been a way to build my own personal space and identity.