Hometown (Inherited)
Theatre Gallery AUGUST 2026
Artist statement
Hometown (Inherited) was born in my early days of motherhood. After having twin boys in January 2013, my worldview changed. As a new parent raising children in my own hometown, I found myself struck by the realization that the Durham of my childhood looked so different from the Durham of theirs. All around us, the environment was in an active state of flux, which only seemed to be accelerating. Encountering these changes felt like glimpsing something elusive that should be captured, something that hinted at answers to questions that would be asked later—What happened to this ground we are standing on? How did we get where we are now?
In April 2014, I began to photograph local parents and their children in these transforming landscapes, starting with a photograph of myself and my one-year-old twins in a clear cut forest in north Durham. From these images, I created a series of mixed media pieces, each composed of 20-24 photographic prints layered and collaged onto canvas or glass and hand-painted with acrylics. More recently, I have incorporated cyanotype and drawing.
My twins are now thirteen years old. The passage of time is evident in this series not just in the environment but in the people themselves. Subjects who appeared in early works return in later ones, underscoring the transient nature of both our human lives and the spaces we live them in. At the heart of this project has always been the desire to capture transition as it is happening. The landscape becomes both a physical embodiment of these transformations (deterioration, demolition, and construction) and the impetus to ponder and question the choices we make as humans. In the midst of it all, babies are born, children grow up, parents age. It has been a true honor to capture these chaotic, tender, fleeting moments of our lives in our shared home.
Bio
Moriah LeFebvre is a mixed media artist, mother, and teacher living in Durham. Moriah utilizes a diversity of media and practices to explore themes of transience, identity, interpersonal connection, and home. While Hometown (Inherited) is her most enduring body of work (2014-present), LeFebvre spent 2020-2021 as the Kenan Graduate Arts Fellow, illuminating the struggles and the resilience of the substance-abuse recovery community during COVID-19 in her project Works In Rough Going. In her film by & by, LeFebvre used hand-animation techniques to juxtapose the story of her great-grandmother’s twins, whose lives were lost to eclampsia in China in 1919, with that of her own twins, who survived the same fate a century later in the US. In the spring of 2024, she screened her film at the Nanjing Massacre Museum in China, bringing her great grandmother’s story full circle. As an instructor at institutions ranging from the Durham Arts Council to Durham Technical Community College, Moriah loves to serve as an intermediary between people and art, sharing her passion for creative expression.