Lilly Gorman

And I left, only to learn what the Texas Sun tried to tell me before I knew how to listen investigates the frictions between the artist’s personal identity and the “mythic ideal” created by the rigid political landscape they grew up in. Using family history to dismantle this ideal, the work conjures the ghost of the artist’s great-great grandmother through a combination of performance and photography. Wearing their ancestor’s garments, and following in her footsteps, Gorman creates an archive that visually blends images of the past and the present, invoking memory as something rooted as much in space as time. Throughout the work, contemporary and archival images visually intertwine, despite being a century apart.

Lilly Gorman uses modes of documentary photography and performance to confront and question concepts of identity, truth, and cultural inheritance. They love to love in the lands of Texas.