Growing up I would compulsively keep things- trinkets, receipts, remnants from a night out. I wanted physical proof that my life was happening, and if I could hold these little pieces of it in my hands I might be able to make sense of it. 

I would habitually empty the sacred scraps from my pockets or my backpack into a plastic orange bin under my desk until the drawer could barely open or close.  When I recently reopened the bin for the first time in years, it felt like going on an archeological dig into myself, excavating layer by layer relationships, friendships, phases, brief obsessions, and traumas.  I was gently dusting off the bones of my history and touching the artifacts built into my foundation.  With the distance of years between us, I saw lines of connection in unexpected places and formative influences threading between pieces I hadn’t before put together.   

As I started to capture these little collections with photographs, it sparked conversations with friends about their own funny and poignant little keepsakes and the foundational memories they hold.  These remnants of who we were was the foundation of who we would become. 

Girlhood Museum is an invitation to rediscover ourselves. It is a living archive of the special scraps we keep, the fossilized objects that hold the stories of why we are. It is a celebration of the clumsy, confident, carefree, core of ourselves forged in both difficulty and joy.  This is a museum of moments and memories.