My mother's untimely death changed many things. Not only did her body slowly but visibly disappear into an incomprehensible nothingness due to cancer, but my memories of her changed as well.
When I think back on my mother now, I think of everything from her end as if my memory of her began with her death.
Finitude was an abstract thought. I knew that life was finite and that one must feel pain because of it. Rather, this thought was a vehicle to give my youthful melancholy a greater urgency. I had never seen what death really looked like. And frankly, I would have imagined it differently. Something noble, whatever that might be. Now that I've seen it, I don't understand it any better. The transition from life to death remains incomprehensible and, in this case, frightening. Sometimes life seems like a dream.
It is incomprehensible how death can be possible. Inevitably, the question arose of what I might do with these pictures. Should I lock them away in a dark box? Can they express more than just a meaningless fact that we all know and don't like to be reminded of anyway? But I need to be able to talk about what I have experienced, about the fact that death exists and how mean it is; how precious and fragile that finitude makes life and how painful it is to lose a loved one.
Another fact that forced itself on me was that my mother was the only person I was still a child to someone, and that place is no longer there. I can remember it, but she is dissolving and I no longer have access to it.
This series depicts my mother's death, the summer house where I spent my childhood and which is now abandoned and dilapidated, and fading childhood memories through half-exposed photographs my mother took when I was a child.
When I think back on my mother now, I think of everything from her end as if my memory of her began with her death.
Finitude was an abstract thought. I knew that life was finite and that one must feel pain because of it. Rather, this thought was a vehicle to give my youthful melancholy a greater urgency. I had never seen what death really looked like. And frankly, I would have imagined it differently. Something noble, whatever that might be. Now that I've seen it, I don't understand it any better. The transition from life to death remains incomprehensible and, in this case, frightening. Sometimes life seems like a dream.
It is incomprehensible how death can be possible. Inevitably, the question arose of what I might do with these pictures. Should I lock them away in a dark box? Can they express more than just a meaningless fact that we all know and don't like to be reminded of anyway? But I need to be able to talk about what I have experienced, about the fact that death exists and how mean it is; how precious and fragile that finitude makes life and how painful it is to lose a loved one.
Another fact that forced itself on me was that my mother was the only person I was still a child to someone, and that place is no longer there. I can remember it, but she is dissolving and I no longer have access to it.
This series depicts my mother's death, the summer house where I spent my childhood and which is now abandoned and dilapidated, and fading childhood memories through half-exposed photographs my mother took when I was a child.
Exhibition Views
