Maggie McCutcheon

This Is Your Name follows the adoption story of the artist’s father, originating in a home for unwed mothers during the post-World War II era. Through performative portraiture, oral testimony, and mapping, she constructs visual narratives of her Irish Catholic grandmother and Ashkenazi Jewish grandfather, depicting the fictitious nature of archives by remaking her own. More than seventy years later, the artist and her father uncover the sites, photographs, documents, and relatives of his earliest days. Together they confront not just the history of adoption practices in maternity homes across North America, but also the narrative of his birth parents, imagining their lives through an intermittent yet generative process of discovery.