Still: I am the memory of my mother.

I am now older than my mother was in a shakey home video recorded by our nine-year-old neighbors Melanie and Lynsey. The camcorder broke and three mini cassettes sat unviewed for twenty-five years. After my mother passed away I had the tapes digitized in an attempt to collect back as much of her as I could. My relationship with my mother was complex, and I still find it hard to define myself separate from her. I am also deeply aware that the person I have grown into could only be realized with distance from her. I imagine I will only ever feel the kind of connection I had with her when I become a mother myself. As my husband and I talk (sometimes argue) about starting a family I’ve felt a greater urgency to recover my mother in her most motherly stage, my infancy.

As I studied the video footage I paused to bring back the lines of her gestures––simple movements that help me remember the slight curl of her smile, the curve of her nose, her eyes pointed toward me. Remembering her clearly is a puzzle I keep practicing in my brain. The video makes her tangible in a way that photos flatten. I imagine the footage is made of tiny grains that evaporate as the video plays and I move to make something more permanent out of the fleeting moment. There is no form that can hold loss.

In my series, Still: I am the memory of my mother (2022), I am not addressing nostalgia, but rather exercising art-making as an act of memory recovery and preservation. Artists form intimate relationships with their content. In our careful observations we may even create synthetic memories illuminated by our study of artifacts. In creating art that also functions as a memorial, I am both introducing my mother to those who never knew her and directing those who did in remembering. As an artist I am a keeper of memory, as a daughter I am the memory of my mother.

Three sculptures Isolate moments with my mother in laser cut wood and acrylic. A set of sequential pieces (each 9x12”) are elevated on clear acrylic platforms. Soft natural tones of the wood stand in for my mother’s skin and hair. She wears neon pink, amplified from the pale pink she wears in the footage. The neon pink acrylic feels familiar––like her nail polish, like my childhood toys. Engravings on clear acrylic cast shadows beneath. You can make out an image of me as a baby being held by my mother. If the lighting is right, the pink of her shirt creates a glow in the shadow, but the details of her face are obscured to only a silhouette. The play between my mother’s face etched in wood and the solid shadow below mimics where memory falls short.

In the third piece of the series images of my mother from video stills are frozen to the surface of an illuminated neon pink cube (6x6x6”). Five sides of the cube offer moments, a breath, a glance. She is laughing, she is smiling, she is both in her own head but present in the moment. The sculpture is two steps from real–having been translated from life to video, to sculpture––but through the process of creating it I have recovered fragments for remembering my mother.