The Southern Expat

For my BFA Capstone Exhibition, I examined my identity as a girl who grew up in the South. After spending my summers interning in New York, I started to feel increasingly self conscious every time I said I was from the South. That feeling stayed with me and led me to question where it came from, and why the stereotypes surrounding Southern women both bothered me and still never seemed to match the women I know and encounter every day. That tension became the starting point for this body of work.

From there, I began looking at how Southern women are portrayed in popular culture as a way to make sense of it all. My mind first went to the most controversial Southern belle, Scarlett O’Hara, and then to the most beloved, Dolly Parton, both as herself and in films like 9 to 5 and Steel Magnolias. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Dolly Parton, but these figures still did not fully resonate with me. Then I started thinking about the portrayals of Southern women I personally connect with. I kept coming back to Reese Witherspoon in Sweet Home Alabama, the students in John Proctor Is the Villain, and the Price sisters in The Poisonwood Bible. These Southern women are not perfect, in fact most of them are incredibly broken, but that is exactly what makes them feel real. What connects all of these narratives is not a single version of Southern womanhood, but the way each story pushes past expected tropes and makes room for something more complicated. They hold contradiction, humor, softness, and strength all at once. As Shelby Holcombe says in John Proctor Is the Villain, “I contain frickin’ multitudes,” and honestly, so do girls from the South.

My artistic practice sits between being an artist and a designer, and I use that in between space to experiment with everything from large scale mixed media painting to fabric integration, watercolor based print work, and garment construction. Moving between mediums allows me to think through ideas in different ways and build meaning through process as much as image.

The Southern Expat comes out of all of this. It explores the rejection, reinvention, and reinterpretation of the Southern Belle archetype, especially through my own experience of feeling like I needed to apologize for where I am from. I kept noticing how disconnected those stereotypes felt from reality, and this work became a way to push back on that and sit inside that complexity instead.

The exhibition is split into two parts. One looks at the Southern Expat idea through my lens as a designer, and the other translates it into large scale watercolor paintings. Together, they sit in conversation with each other and suggest that reinventing Southern identity is not about leaving it behind, but about staying rooted in where you come from while also allowing yourself the freedom to break away from convention and become something more expansive.