Stories I’m Telling Myself

Rebecca Waring-Crane

For my thesis Exhibition, I created and documented art based on my own childhood memories. The collection of three - dimensional stories-installation and sculpture - is designed to engage viewers in ways that numbers of facts cannot, but rather in the ways that only well-told visual stories can.

Using story as my medium, I revisit and reshape the stories I unconsciously told myself as a child growing up in a close-knit, but very authoritarian family. My art serves as a form of agency as I seek to understand and find the humanity in those stories – the humor, awkwardness, bravery, shame, kindness, grief. In retelling stories, I also tap into the quiet power that comes with the practice of looking intently and listening deeply to narratives that often go unexamined, unchallenged.

I present work that renders the internal as external. Familiar materials or objects evoke surprise meaning, shifted perspective, and challenged expectations.

Appropriate to the general public, the collection speaks especially to viewers who relate to childhood trauma that breaks no laws, leaves no bruises, and often goes unnamed. The mood of the work is awkward, mind your step, loneliness – which is how I often felt as a child. The work also implies the power of reparenting the self, and the agency of being a witness to the wounded child in each of us.

Rebecca Waring-Crane has lived in Lebanon, Kenya, and Midwest America. She earned a Bachelor’s in Education in Takoma Park, Maryland, and a Masters in English & Communication in Valparaiso, Indiana. She has taught grade school in Nairobi, Kenya, and college students writing and public speaking in Riverside, California. Through the process Rebecca learned to trust her own heart and so completed her MFA in Studio Arts at California State University, San Bernardino in 2020. 

Exhibitions include The Body Catalog, 2018 at California State University, San Bernardino, the group exhibition Everything All At Once at the Chaffey Community Museum of Art in Ontario, California, 2019, and Stories I’m Telling Myself, the artist’s thesis project in 2020, shown at the Robert and frances Fullerton Museum of Art, Cal State, San Bernardino. 

After years of eschewing the name, today Waring-Crane wholeheartedly embraces the title of artist as she cultivates a multidisciplinary practice animated by objects, words, questions that have many answers or none at all, and the dance of listening, learning and teaching. 

With story as her medium, Waring-Crane reclaims and reshapes the narratives of family, identity and memory as a way to understand and find the humanity in them-the humor, awkwardness, bravery, shame, kindness, mystery, and grief.

With story as her medium, Waring-Caring reclaims and reshapes the narratives of family, identity and memory as a way to understand and find the humanity in them-the humor, awkwardness, bravery, shame, kindness, mystery, and grief.