My piece explores the purpose of childhood nostalgia. I always wondered whether my nostalgia was a counterproductive desire to remain in the past. Through my research, I learned that nostalgia has many psychological benefits. What stood out to me was a study proving that when people make sense of memories, they build self-continuity and personal identity.

I was inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of “eternal return,” meaning that time is cyclical and everything that happened will happen again, in a loop. In my piece, I stitched together cyanotypes of recent self-portraits, images I had taken of family members and places, and old family photos to create a web of memories with no real timeline. I also learned that we do not remember events as they happened, but our emotions highlight certain points and fictionalize our memories to some degree, so I toned the cyanotypes using coffee, tea, and baking soda to evoke different emotions.

I put the images in antique trunks, using the theme of travel to represent change. Even though times are changing, we can keep memories with us. In the bottom of the bigger trunk, I incorporated cyanotypes of symbols that reminded me of childhood, including an excerpt of a letter from my grandfather and a spiderman comic. I did not include the actual items because I wanted them to be distorted, referencing the idea that our memories are not accurate. In the smaller trunk, I hung a wooden top with a spiral of red paint beneath it, showing that our memories impact our identity.