Memory is malleable…

At times, the harder I try to grasp a memory, the more ephemeral and elusive it is, like mist disappearing as I advance through it, always remaining just beyond touch. Other times, a memory feels hard and brittle, focused and razor sharp. I think about how memory shape-shifts, changes as I move forward, and as my understanding of the past changes.



My work has predominately focused on this experience of memory. My mother had renal failure when I was 14. What followed were 8 1/2 years of dialysis, kidney transplants, too many hospitalizations to count, and her death when I was 23. This experience brought an acute awareness of the fragility of human life, the precarious balance between safety and uncertainty, joy and sadness, love and pain. 



Living through these difficult experiences at a young age, and finding support, context and understanding from those within the service professions (nurse, therapist) made me think about joining a helping profession. Turning my own painful experience into a cause to help others. I relinquished the idea of becoming a writer and instead earned a Master’s degree in Social Work. Not coincidentally, I chose counseling in a residential treatment center for adolescents.

Experiences as studio material

My personal experiences and those as a therapist influence the ongoing themes that challenge me and find expression in my work: memory, loss, the fragility of human connection, how we hold (are grounded) within the physical, emotional and psychological marks of personal experience.



In my art practice, trees were one of the first metaphors I used. Recording their physical experience within their rings, they physically show the passage of time and reference dormancy and rebirth; the healing over of external wounds. Further thoughts about the shifting experience of memory led me to aged mirrors. I used patina and rusted metal to make physical the passage of time on materials. 



My shattered mirror pieces speak to the refractory nature of memory, its pain and beauty, and the remembrance, as well as the unreliability of it. I create work from my personal memory but revel in how others bring their own history to the work. These pieces have been likened to environmental concerns, the man-made marking and destruction of the natural world, as emblematic of the invasion of cancer, and to the beautiful healing of a wound.



In more recent work, I explore concepts of memory as ritual. Ritual as tribute, celebration, memorial marker, remembrance of past experience and family tradition. Passed down skills and traditions offer a sense of reclamation of family narratives and connection to a larger generational and historical remembering. Rituals and collected materials help me hold onto memory, bring it back within reach and pull the story forward for the next generation. My burnt, dyed, stitched paper pieces and teabag collages (see my post Marking Time) speak to these themes, as well as to the need to patch together meaning, despite loss and disappointment. Creation embodies determined insistence on resilience and hope, a way to process and move forward.

All of these explorations start with the layering of concept, material and process. Recently I started piercing abaca paper with thorns. I was struck by how beautiful, lyrical and yet discomfiting it is: the graduated dark shapes, the fragility and strength of the skin-like abaca paper. I don’t know yet what this will look like when it is done. Whether it will be a page to be read, a sculpture as body, or a piece of something much larger. For now, I will continue to follow the materials, their resonances within me and trust that my hands, heart and head will figure it out along the way. A collective physical, emotional, and mental memory connecting concepts and playing out within the making of my work.

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