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I have been collecting Confederate commemorative plates since 2016 in response to the rise in white supremacist pride in contemporary culture. I imagine these objects as Trojan horses hanging innocently among family photos. These plates were printed long after the Civil War with romantic illustrations, and created for people to hang in their homes, to pass dangerous values down to future generations aided by collectable marketing.
When I stumbled across my first set of plates in a tiny junk shop it felt like a call to action. I immediately envisioned using the porcelain cutting techniques I have mastered to grind out these harmful symbols of oppression. I edit each plate by extracting the Confederate symbols, leaving only the American landscape between the voids. The dust from each removal is harvested and displayed below its plate of origin to show that history cannot be erased; there is still a residue and the dust remains.
It wasn’t until I began this work that I learned that I have ancestors that fought and died for the Confederacy. Now this work is as much a rejection of systems of oppression as it is a reckoning about my own place in those systems. Speeches like Douglass' spoken over a century ago illustrate how little has changed and remind us not to settle for symbolic gestures of progress, there is still mighty work ahead.