Projects

An Impression of My Mother

01.06.07 |

Exhibition: Ledge, Ramp Gallery, Hamilton, New Zealand
Website: http://ramp.mediarts.net.nz

Concept:
An Impression of My Mother began as a keepsake. My mother collects magazine and newspaper snippets, bank statements, social security envelopes, newspaper cartoons, birthday cards and sends them to me in bulk; new diet tonics, poems, bible verses, small puzzle books, photos of my cousin’s children, obituaries, current editions of my high school newspaper, etc. Occasionally she annotates things with yellow sticky-notes and handwritten points of reference and often she doesn’t. Sometimes it’s a box.

Part of this need to hold on to this artefact of my mother is my parent’s ages, which means it is also my age. During the years of absence between the times we see each other off or greet each other at an airport, we age significantly. We miss hundreds of chances for lunches and get-togethers. Which leads me to sometimes wish they lived in Sydney or Wellington, even as close as a small farm on the other side of Te Awamutu, which is closer than 12578 kilometres.

It’s similar to a vivid memory that once occurred physically and now can only be remembered. These scraps of paper are objects full of recognition and identity; from the inscription itself and the place that signatures hold in our society, to the name and its genealogy continually working backwards and forwards. There is something about the bruising of the layers of paper and how they each captured the pressure of her fingers; something so human and fragile in the way the letters were formed. The darkest one holds the ink itself, the pen that responded to the movements of her hand and the lightest one captures just enough to faintly hold the strokes.

It began as a keepsake, cherished; a form of memory that I carry with me.

ledge 1
ledge 2



Previous post in this category:
Next post in this category: