My Mother’s Clothes
Selina Vicenzino
My Mother’s Clothes reflects on the women who raised me, exploring femininity, memory & loss, and how their impact has formed my understanding of self.
I spent a lot of time with my great aunties as a child. With my parents at work and my older sisters at school, I would get dropped off at my great auntie Phoebe’s house in the middle of Brisbane. She lived with her sister Barbara, and often their other sisters, including my nan, would visit. We spent our days having such gentle times full of giggles, often going to the corner store and buying scratchies or cooking scones with milk that’d gone bad. My understanding of my grandma at that age was simple. She was a strong, stern woman who loved pawpaw, taking care of her orchids & her sisters.
All of her sisters passed away before I was an adult. I have listened to so many fragmented stories of different parts of their lives and who they were as people. Although so much of my girlhood is indebted to them and their care, it feels strange only really knowing them through the eyes of a child. My grandma lived until 102, passing away in 2022. She was tough and independent. After her husband’s death at 55, she carried a certain anger. The femininity she and her sisters applied to their lives was rooted in independence and care, yet also was marked with conservatism and restraint of their time.
My mother and older sisters express a continuation of femininity that is clear and absolute, continuing the importance of caring for each other and respecting what once was, but not feeding into worry embedded within.
My mum’s house now, is the house that my great aunties & grandma used to live in. There’s masses of old photos and clothes in storage and my mum has a story for every one. Clothes that were made for her by my nan or her sisters, or clothes that were passed down in other ways. The ways I connect with the women who raised me are through the memories embedded within these garments. It is such a strange and comfortable feeling to know the experiences of different special items before I got to inherit them. Having tangible, passed down items that represent their care and memory, allows me to dwell on their lives as women from another time and upholds their presence in my life now.
The images I have taken serve as a reflection of them as I explore the emotional residue left behind. Through playful posing, I express a sense of liberation from the misogyny ingrained into so many family units. I don’t know if they would have approved of the way I move through the world now but that doesn’t really matter. My remembrance of them is free from guilt and instead held in tenderness, as an ongoing dialogue with their energy. Each garment I wear carries the weight of family history and through inhabiting these clothes, I follow the continuity of feminine energy – how everything I am is born from what has been left behind.
https://www.peachylina.com/
https://www.instagram.com/peachy.lina/
