“...where the touchable rawness of life becomes part of the fabric of the everyday, and a robust luminous vulnerability becomes shot through with the necessary, imminent and inevitable prospect of loss…” Crisis, David Whyte

I am rewired; my heart forever adapted to the “necessary, imminent and inevitable prospect of loss.” 

Upon my dad’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, every point of connection became a reckoning.  Small bits of forgetfulness during weekly chats - the inability to remember an event or how long I lived in Charlotte - were the first bite-sized bits of grief, easy to digest and dismiss.  As his decline grew more acute, weekly conversations with my mom delivered fresh grief. Individually and collectively, we marked the moment of every loss: the loss of independence, movement, and words. In crisis, loss becomes the rhythm, not the exception, “...the touchable rawness of life becomes part of the fabric of the everyday.” 

The “everyday” has become hard to process.  Subsequently, my time behind the easel lessened, my time in the morning, pen in hand, lengthened. In words, I “gathered” my father’s losses, pieces of his identity, so as not to lose the one I love. 

While my practice in the studio has focused on nostalgia, specifically the intersection of memory and place, this “daily gathering”  informs new ways of creating. As the unofficial archivist of my family’s history,  I ascribe new meaning to inherited collections of canceled stamps, photos, letters and vintage books. Combining printmaking, collage and mark making, these intimate studies on paper compel me, as the artist, and invite the viewer to meditate on personal connections to what is left behind.

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