Make Your Honey

Make Your Honey (2019) is primarily an audio piece of a phone call with my mother, who went through the hardship of coming to America for a chance at giving her first born daughter to grow up with the opportunities America had to offer at the time. Though I consider it to be a written and verbal piece, it has animated visual elements to it to add to this narrative of a mother/daughter relationship.

The audio component of this project is a phone call between my mother and I, distant under the privilege to be able to go to school in New York City, given to me by my mother’s hard work and sacrifices. The speech is an excerpt from a letter she wrote to me on the back of a parting gift— a painting of a bee she did at a Sip n’ Paint event. (“Dear Audrey, Aerodynamically, bees can’t fly, but they do. You will always be my bee. I’m letting you go and fly, and I know you will make something good for others, so make your honey.”)

Make Your Honey as an animated narrative reflects on the intimate nature of mother and daughter relationships. Though it exists in an innately complicated yet loving milieu, the nature of the relationship is one that sets the foundations for societal relations for the daughter. As the first generation American of an immigrant mother, it is commonly found to be difficult to identify as one nationality or the other, or both. Many children of diaspora would attest to the constant uncertainty in identity. What remains consistent is the values and traits shared between the identity of the mother and the identity of the daughter. In this final project, it is far from just a short diegesis of acquiring jewelry, but rather the experimentation of performance art and the innate control of time through video.

First done with recordings of performing each action, then broken up frame by frame to contour the subjects. The act of putting the rings on, which appeared first together, branch out onto two different hands, much like the timeline of living under one roof, growing up in the childhood home, followed by a clear separation in their paths. Where there is tension in an attempt to slide the ring on, there is hesitation. The recording of a phone call alludes to distance in between, and the acoustic melody in the background is one that brings the two together. The original message from mother to daughter serves as a reminder of the history and hard work that had to be done in order for the opportunities that were made available for the latter.

As a supplement to the studio project, I wrote a final paper for my seminar class about mother/daughter relationships, what it means to be a first generation Asian American, and what it means to be raised as a Muslim in America. You can view this essay here.

I think what I achieved during the critique was to deliver a moving and personal story about my intimate relationship with my mother, despite our differences. Not necessarily the different ideals my mother and I held, but the differences between the various circumstances of life me and my classmates had. Perhaps to reach the heart of a girl who grew up in an affluent, white family albeit having been raised completely different from me, was my primary purpose.

What I think I could’ve done better was work on my illustration skills beforehand. I am very used to rotoscoping, and wish I could have completely animated characters without reference and tell more of a complete story through animation that way. The video above is simply a stringy rotoscope of a small and tender moments that define our relationship.