In ALL THAT IS, I’m exploring the handwriting of my parents, who both died when I was young.
After working with my father’s archival photographs in my previous series NOW IS ALWAYS, I felt I was finally ready to read the condolence letters my mother received after he died, and the ones my brother and sister and I received following her death when I was 15. I had kept the letters in a steamer trunk for more than 40 years. I don’t think I’d ever opened that trunk during that time.
It was, of course, sad to read these letters. Yet mixed in with the condolences were love notes my mother and father had exchanged when they were first dating, along with his reporter’s notebooks, which documented the beginning of their relationship. It was a wonderful surprise, and previously hidden parts of their lives suddenly revealed themselves.
In this series of gravures, I’m combining material from that steamer trunk with my own photography.
I’m dyslexic, and the marks they made in letters and notebooks remind me of the tension one feels when one recognizes language but struggles to comprehend it.
Memory can work the same way—try as we may to reach into the past, we can never grasp it.
These are feelings I think we all share when recalling a first love, a first loss, the first sense of ourselves aging, and the first awareness that ultimately, we are the marks we leave behind.
